What If You Fell Into the Mariana Trench?

What if you fell into the Mariana Trench? Not in a submarine. Just you, sinking at about a metre a second, all the way to the deepest place on Earth. Drop Mount Everest into Challenger Deep and its summit would still be two kilometres underwater. On the way down the water eats the colours, red first, then everything but blue. The last sunlight is gone after about seventeen minutes, a kilometre down. Then come marine snow, flashes of bioluminescence, the vampire squid, the gulper eel and the anglerfish's lure. Past four kilometres the pressure is hundreds of times the surface: foam cups shrink, but you mostly don't, because you're mostly water. At about 8,200 metres the fish give up. Below that it's amphipods with aluminium armour, giant single cells and bacteria. Then, about three hours after you jumped, you land at 10,935 m, in soft grey ooze, under eight tons per square inch, next to a plastic bag. This is a thought experiment: nobody could survive the fall. Everything else is real science. Every scene and creature in this video is our own simulation and drawing. Chapters 0:00 What if you fell into the Mariana Trench? 0:46 The deepest place on Earth 2:07 Losing the light 3:41 The midnight zone 5:09 The crushing deep 6:35 Where fish give up 7:56 The bottom 9:54 Still being discovered Sources Trench, Challenger Deep depth (10,935 ± 6 m) and its three pools: Greenaway et al. (2021); NOAA Ocean Exploration Everest's height (8,848.86 m): China–Nepal joint survey (2020) Ocean light zones: NOAA Ocean Service Pressure and temperature at the bottom: Dziak et al., Oceanography (2017), NOAA hydrophone mooring Pressure and the air in your lungs: WHOI; diving physiology (Boyle's law) Freediving and scuba records (Nitsch 214 m, Gabr 332 m): world-record listings Deepest military submarine (K-278 Komsomolets, 1,020 m) Foam cups at depth: NOAA Ocean Exploration; Live Science Bioluminescence (three out of four animals): Martini & Haddock, Scientific Reports (2017), MBARI Vampire squid, gulper eel and anglerfish: MBARI; WHOI Ocean Twilight Zone Whale dives: Natural History Museum; WHOI; beaked whale record (2,992 m), Guinness World Records Shinkai Seep Field clams (~5,700 m): University of Hawaii; PNAS (2012) Mariana snailfish: Gerringer et al., Zootaxa (2017); 8,178 m footage, JAMSTEC/NHK (2017) Deepest fish (8,336 m): Jamieson et al. (2022), Guinness World Records TMAO and the fish depth limit: Yancey et al., PNAS (2014) Amphipods and aluminium: Kobayashi et al., PLOS ONE (2019) Xenophyophores: Scripps Institution of Oceanography Microbes in the trench floor: Glud et al., Nature Geoscience (2013) Hadal zone share of the seafloor: Jamieson, via ScienceAlert The deepest plastic bag (10,898 m, 1998): Chiba et al., Marine Policy (2018) Pollution in amphipods: Jamieson et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017) Trieste, Deepsea Challenger and Limiting Factor dives; people who reached Challenger Deep: NOAA; Wikipedia list of Challenger Deep descents Seafloor mapping: Seabed 2030 / IHO Fall time, pressure per square inch and the teaspoon of air: our own calculations from the sources above Next on Big What If: what if a star exploded near Earth? Subscribe to @bigwhatif so you don't miss it. #BigWhatIf #MarianaTrench #Ocean