What If You Sank to the Bottom of the Ocean and Kept Going?

The cable snaps. You're wearing a diving suit that can't break, above the deepest place on Earth. You sink. Past the sharks, past the last of the sunlight, past the anglerfish and the whales, down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. And then you keep going. THE NUMBERS ARE REAL • Pressure: about 1 extra atmosphere for every 10 m of seawater. At the bottom it's over 1,000 atm. • Oceanic whitetip shark: up to about 3 m (rarely longer). • The sunlight zone ends at about 200 m. Below 1,000 m no sunlight reaches at all (the midnight zone). • Scuba depth record: 332.35 m (Ahmed Gabr, 2014). • Burj Khalifa: 828 m tall. • Sperm whales: males up to about 16 m. They dive below 2,000 m to hunt squid and find it by clicking. • Most deep-sea animals make their own light (bioluminescence). • Female anglerfish: many species are about 20 cm or smaller. • Cuvier's beaked whale: the deepest dive ever recorded for a mammal, 2,992 m, and a dive of 222 minutes. • Titanic: about 3,800 m down, in the North Atlantic. • Deepest shipwreck ever found: USS Samuel B. Roberts, 6,865 m, Philippine Sea (2022). • Deepest fish ever filmed: a snailfish at 8,336 m (Izu–Ogasawara Trench, 2022). • Mount Everest: 8,849 m. • Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench: about 10,935 m. Fewer people have been there than to space. • Deepest hole ever dug: the Kola Superdeep Borehole, 12,262 m. • Diamonds form roughly 150–200 km down. • The mantle is solid rock that flows, a few centimetres a year. • Outer core (liquid iron and nickel) starts at about 2,890 km. Its radius, about 3,480 km, is larger than Mars. • Inner core (solid iron) starts at about 5,150 km. It's about 1,220 km in radius (about 70% as wide as the Moon) and about 5,400 °C, close to the temperature of the Sun's surface. • The centre of the Earth: 6,371 km down, about 3.6 million atmospheres. • Straight through the Earth from the Challenger Deep you'd come out on the coast of Brazil. SOME OF IT ISN'T REAL No suit could survive this, and nothing can sink through rock. Your speed changes so you can see things: real sinking would be steady. The animals don't all live in one column of water, and the anglerfish wouldn't really bite you. The shipwreck is an illustration: the real deepest wreck is in the Philippine Sea, not the Mariana Trench. The inside of the Earth is drawn in stylised colour; nobody has ever seen it. Pressure and temperature inside the Earth come from models (PREM), not measurements. And the ending ("you'd fall straight through, then back, forever") is the old thought experiment of a hole through the Earth with no air and no friction. CHAPTERS 0:00 The surface 0:54 The twilight zone 1:49 The midnight zone 3:00 The abyss 3:15 The trench 4:21 Challenger Deep 4:51 The crust 5:24 The mantle 7:08 The outer core 7:50 The inner core 8:32 The centre #whatif #ocean #marianatrench #science #3danimation