Scientists Have Discovered A Place Deeper Than The Mariana Trench
In 2018 NASA started testing a new probe designed to explore the oceans but why is the world’s biggest space agency decided to go underwater. It turns out that this challenging task requires using the newest knowledge and technologies. In this blog you’ll find out what challenges is NASA gearing up to face deep under the sea.
How deep can a human dive
Human dive into the ocean probes are a must when exploring outer space is we can’t go there ourselves but the ocean is a different story. Many people can run their own ocean studies by just diving into it a regular human with no special equipment can’t go deeper than just six meters. If they have a scuba set they can go 40 meters down although there are free divers that can plunge a hundred meters below sea level without it. It’s still nothing compared to the formidable depth of the ocean. It’s very far away even from the first layer called the epipelagic zone. Its lower boundary lies at a depth of 200 meters. This is where sunlight can still penetrate and where phytoplankton lives as well as the fish that feed on it plus predators like dolphins or sharks but can a human get any deeper. This is Ahmed Kabeer and he has broken a record for the deepest scuba dive at a stunning 332 meters this means he reached the mesopelagic also known as the midnight zone. It extends from 200 to 1000 kilometers below the surface even the best military submarines can’t go down this line there’s no sunlight anymore and animals living there possess incredible features. They’ve adapted to semi-darkness thanks to their big eyes and bioluminescence and what’s more this place is where ninety of all fish can be found and that’s around 10 billion tons the population of creepy cyclophone alone stands at one quadrillion fish but it’s just the tip of the iceberg since deep sea trenches extend across many more kilometers and keep many secrets what if we try to explore them?
Dark and Cold Ocean
How to reach the dark and cold ocean floor? How do we reach the dark and cold ocean floor if even submarines can’t do? That the deepest point is located beneath the western pacific ocean it’s the mariana trench it’s called the challenger deep and it has a depth of 11,034 meters the pressure at that depth is 100 times higher than on the surface to survive in this place we’ll need a special watercraft the most famous of them is deep sea challenger as it was used in 2012 by oscar-winning director james cameron in an expedition to the mariana trench bottom the only piloted submersible that had ever been there before was trieste in 1960. This bathuscafe carrying lieutenant don walsh and jacques picard an engineer became the first vehicle in history to descend to the ocean floor since then 13 more people have repeated this journey that’s ten times less than astronauts flying into space.
The deepest region of the ocean is called the hadal zone it stretches from the six kilometer point and down to the very bottom of oceanic trenches life forms that have adjusted to existing in such a place look like a product of some mad imagination for example disco jellies or snailfish that resembles a water dragon or fish that belong to the genus of ophidian and look as though. They’ve been turned inside out scientists haven’t used piloted vehicles but rather modern and remotely controlled ones to study them closely they can descend to the maximum depths and stay there for a long time while receiving commands via long cables but even they sometimes fail to withstand severe conditions specific to the ocean floor in many ways. They’re even more dangerous than those of outer space in 2014 an underwater vehicle nereus operating under the U.S. flag went down to the kermadec trench located close to new Zealand. It was simply torn apart at a depth of around 10 kilometers because of high pressure at that time. It was the only functioning watercraft designed for such missions losing it caused a long hiatus in related studies and stalled progress. It seems that we’ve tried to bite off more than we could chew but there are other oceans in this world too and they’re even more inaccessible and hostile
Why are extraterrestrial oceans so mysterious?
Extraterrestrial oceans much more mysterious than our own the surface of europa jupiter’s satellite is composed of water ice according to scientists. This ice sheet has a thickness between 15 and 25 kilometers and under it there’s an ocean astrobiologists suggest that there might well be life on its bottom around hydrothermal vents that release the satellite’s internal heat. This kind of life might be similar to that existing in the deep waters of earth furthermore enceladus saturn’s satellite may also be habitable from time to time steam jets generated by internal heat break through the ice covering its poles in 2018 a space probe called cassini discovered that they contained water however to find life there we’ll have to send a nerius-like probe to the depths of both satellites but the ocean of enceladus must be around 30 kilometers deep while on europa the waters must be as much as from 60 to 150 kilometers deep that’s 15 times more than what we have here on earth. what can be hidden at a tremendous depth like that compared to this cameron’s expedition seems to be a cakewalk such a mission requires serious preparations and that’s why NASA has started practicing deep diving on earth.
How is NASA going to explore the ocean pits?
We’ve entered the coastal water with scuba sets we’ve reached the depths in bathus caves and yet we don’t really know what lies in most of the water territory. At the moment around 80 percent of the ocean remains unexplored. These ocean parts are called the bathypelagic and abyssopelagic or the midnight zone and the abyss highly specialized species resistant to high pressure like for example a tripod fish or a deep sea angler fish are just a small part of the deep sea world. We’ve managed to discover given zero visibility the research is basically done by grouping around in the darkness and since the submersibles can work only for some limited time under such enormous pressure. It’s impossible to probe the vast expanse of the midnight zone and the abyss or instead it used to be impossible until NASA stepped in they’ve created an underwater drone called orpheus to fill in the blanks on ocean maps. It’s equipped with high sensitivity cameras and sensors that had been previously installed on the perseverance mars rover and can examine rocks shells living organisms and create 3d maps of the bottom areas.
The relatively small probe weighs 250 kilograms and is made of syntactic foam a floating composite material filled with teeny glass beads to make it more durable sounds fun. I’d like to take a ride in it and its powerful flashlight helps. It save energy and take high quality pictures at the same time many details for the orpheus were taken from the bathuscafe used by james cameron to go down the mariana trench. I guess it means that we’re gonna witness mysterious creatures getting discovered very soon who knows how many of them lurk in the obscure world of the oceans and who knows what else we can find in the abyss perhaps a huge prehistoric shark that crashes our probes or maybe atlantean citizens are behind that because they hate seeing our machines polluting their secret city or could it be aliens doing their best to stay unnoticed.
