Exploring the deepest point on Earth: Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep
Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench, is seven miles below sea level in the Pacific Ocean, more than two miles above Everest.
If Mount Everest is characterized by something, it is for being the highest point on planet Earth. Belonging to the Himalayas, and located on the border between China and Nepal, it has a height of 29,032 feet (8848 meeters) above sea level.
On the flipside of the coin, the deepest place on Earth is in the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, in the Mariana Trench, the Challenger Deep which has a depth of nearly 36,000 feet deep (11 kilometers). That is to say, it has almost a mile and a half of difference with the Himalayan mountain. The closest land is Fais Island, one of the outer islands of Yap, 180 miles to the southwest, and Guam, 190 miles to the northeast.
With regard to its nomenclature, it was named in honor of the British Royal Navy shipHMS Challenger, which participated in the discovery of the abyss in 1875. Challenger was the mission whose objective was to carry out the first oceanographic exploration of these characteristics. The pressure in this abyss is about a thousand times higher than at sea level.
On the measurement, the first record of the British was 8,148 meters. However, successive measurements made by other crews, such as the one made by the bathyscaphe Trieste (Swiss design and Italian construction) and with Jacques Piccard as captain, determined that the depth was 11,034 meters, a much higher figure compared to that made in the 19th century, made with more advanced technology than in those times.
In this century, the last two missions were carried out in 2009 with the Nereus, a hybrid unmanned autonomous underwater vehicle built by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and in 2012 the director filmmaker and explorer James Cameron descended to a depth of eleven thousand meters in the 'Deepsea Challenger'. Thus, he became the first human being to reach the abyss in a vehicle manned by a single person.
Record achieved by a Spanish aeronautical engineer
The aeronautical engineer Héctor Salvador was the first Spaniard to descend into the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on the planet. Specifically, he went down into the Sirena Deep, the third deepest point aboard the DSV Limiting Factor submarine, which he himself helped design. This abyss is located 10,706 meters deep.
The Mariana Trench is near the countries of Southeast Asia, Oceania and part of Polynesia. Specifically, it is close to the Mariana Islands and Guam, so jurisdictionally control falls to the United States.