Nothing About The Mariana Trench Is Ordinary... Here's Why

Nothing About The Mariana Trench Is Ordinary... Here's Why Why is there a hole almost 11 km deep in the Mariana Trench? Starting with the 1960 Trieste dive, this calm deep-time documentary shows how the trench was born 52 million years ago, why it swallows Jurassic seafloor and drowned islands, how snailfish moved in, and how the trench itself will one day close. Main sources: Greenaway et al. 2021, Deep-Sea Research I (depth of the Challenger Deep) Koppers, Staudigel & Duncan 2003, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (age of the Pigafetta Basin seafloor) Arculus et al. 2015, Nature Geoscience; Reagan et al. 2019, Earth and Planetary Science Letters (birth of the trench, IODP) Fryer 2012, Annual Review of Marine Science (serpentinite mud volcanoes) Wang et al. 2019, Nature Ecology & Evolution; Peng, Du et al. 2025, Nature (snailfish genome; hadal chemosynthetic life) Yancey et al. 2014, PNAS (the depth limit for fish) Archive photos: US Navy and Wikimedia Commons. Stock footage from Pexels and Pixabay; a few illustrative scenes are AI-generated, and the maps and graphics are our own. 0:00 The crack at nine kilometres 3:20 The oldest seafloor on Earth 7:22 The day the Pacific began to sink 11:12 Drowned islands on a conveyor belt 14:51 Mud volcanoes from the slab 17:49 How life moved in 22:40 Why no giants live at the bottom 25:32 The trench that will close #prehistoric #paleontology #deeptime