The seven-mile Mariana Trench is a crushing abyss deeper than Everest where “alien” beasts slither and hidden secrets lurk in the dark
Forget outer space – the real monsters are lurking right under our noses in a bone-crushing abyss that makes Mount Everest look like a pebble. Deep in the Pacific Ocean lies a watery grave so dark and mysterious it’s been dubbed the “Hadal Zone” after Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.
At nearly seven miles deep, the Mariana Trench is a terrifying frontier where the pressure would squash a human like a grape, yet strange “alien” beasts continue to thrive in the gloom.
To put the scale of this terrifying chasm into perspective – if you stacked Mount Everest, Ben Nevis and the Burj Khalifa on top of each other in the trench, the Burj’s spire would still be underwater.
While most of us get jittery in the deep end of a swimming pool, Kathy Sullivan, 74, is made of much tougher stuff. The legendary explorer already boasted being the first American woman to walk in space on her CV from a 1984 mission.
But in 2020, she swapped the stars for the sludge, plummeting to the Challenger Deep – the absolute lowest point of the trench near Guam.
Buckled into a two-seater Trident sub for a gruelling 12-hour mission, Kathy descended to three times the depth of the Titanic’s wreckage.
She said: “You’re sitting inside this cosy little metal sphere, you might be munching a tuna fish sandwich, and yet outside that sphere, the pressure is about 1,100 times greater than it is here on the surface of the Earth.”
You might expect a wasteland at such depths, but Kathy witnessed a bizarre world of slithering organisms and alien-like creatures.
They included sea cucumbers dancing in the currents, marine worms and prehistoric shrimp, as well as mysterious tracks left by organisms slithering across the seabed. “There were some sea cucumbers on the bottom that were being pushed along by some combination of our thrusters and the ambient current,” she told the Marine Technology Society.
But it isn’t just strange biology down there as a year before Kathy’s descent, explorer Victor Vescovo found something perhaps more frightening than any deep-sea monster – a plastic bag. Even seven miles down, human filth has managed to infiltrate the untouched abyss.
Despite the wonders found at the bottom of the world, Kathy is baffled as to why we aren’t spending more cash exploring our own planet.
“We knew more about our moon and Mars than we do about the deep sea,” she told Great Big Story. “So little is known about the shape of the bottom. So one of the key objectives was mapping the deep seafloor.”
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