Sounding the Deepest Spot on Earth
Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam is the deepest spot on Earth. How do we know? We didn’t look for it. We listened.
Transcript
Locating the deepest spot on earth isn’t straightforward. Light barely penetrate more than a few hundred feet in water so we can’t see the bottom.
But sound… (beep, beep, beep)…does.
Measure the time it takes for sound to make the roundtrip from surface to bottom and you can calculate distance.
And in 1951, while pinging sound across the Pacific, scientists honed in on the deepest spot…210 miles southwest of Guam…in the Mariana Trench.
Sonar reveals a 15-hundred mile gash in the earth…formed as the Pacific tectonic plate collides and dives under the Philippine plate.
The trench’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep, is 36,070 feet down.
Only 2 people ever made it here. That was more than 50 years ago.
James Cameron will do it alone.
