In a study that covered more than 75,5 kilometers, scientists were able to accurately measure the deepest points of each of Earth's five oceans. There were 39 dives over ten months, between 2018 and 2019, to create more accurate maps of the waters that cover most of the globe. And from this work, a confirmation emerged: the Mariana Trench is the deepest of all.
The Five Deeps Expedition (FDE) was led by Doctor Alan Jamieson, from the University of Newcastle, in England. For the dives, the group used the Limiting Factor (LV), a submersible capable of carrying two people. About 61% of the sites visited by FDE had never been mapped with modern technology.
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Inside the submersible was a state-of-the-art full-depth multi-beam echo-probe. The equipment emitted a series of sound pulses to map each part of the seabed. Former US intelligence officer Victor Vescovo was the one who launched the LV on missions.
He became the fourth person in history to reach the Depression Challenger, the lowest point on the Earth's surface, in May 2019. In the Mariana Trench, Vescovo found three new species of marine life, recovered the deepest piece of rock in the mantle of Terra and found a plastic bag and a packet of candy. Examples of the distance that pollution has reached.
Deepest points in the oceans
The Challenger Depression follows the deepest place in the oceans, 10.924 meters deep. In the Pacific Ocean, the second deepest place is the Horizon Depression, in the Tonga Trench, at 10.816 meters deep. It is also the second largest in the entire globe.
The Atlantic Ocean has its lowest point at the Puerto Rico Trench. The Brownson Depression is 8.378 meters deep. The Arctic Ocean has the smallest of the deepest points among the five oceans analyzed. There, the Molloy Depression measures 5.551 feet deep.
The data collected by the scientists also pointed out for the first time the deepest points of the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean (or Antarctic Glacier). The latter is nothing more than a southern extension of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.
In the Indian Ocean, the lowest point is at 7.187 meters and still has no name, but it is located in the Java Trench, near the coast of Indonesia. Before, it was speculated that the deepest place was the Diamantina Fracture Zone, but this area narrowly misses 7.019 meters in depth.
The Factorian Depression is in the Southern Ocean, 7.432 meters, at the southern tip of the South Sandwich Islands Trench. There is still an interesting piece of information about this calculation. The deepest point of the South Sandwich Islands Trench is Meteor Depression, 8.265 meters, but that part is still in the Atlantic Ocean.
The researchers published the study in Geoscience Data Journal, led by Cassandra Bongiovanni, chief hydrographic researcher at FDE. "The expedition provided us with a unique opportunity to accurately map some of the deepest and most remote places in the world and to validate these depth measurements collected by submersibles and support dives," she told the Daily Mail.
Via: DailyMail
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