Ocean4 steps
The crush zone
A rabbit hole is a short chain of facts where each one hands you to the next. Start at the top and see where it leaves you.
- Mars is better mapped than Earth's own seafloor.
Essentially all of Mars has been mapped from orbit in high resolution, but only about a quarter of Earth's seafloor has been surveyed to comparable detail. The rest is estimated…
So what's actually down there? Start with the pressure…
- The deep sea presses a car's weight on every square cm.
At the bottom of the Challenger Deep, nearly 11 km down, the pressure exceeds a thousand atmospheres — roughly the weight of a small car pressing on every square centimetre…
Yet that crush zone has permanent residents — up to a hard line…
- Below 8,400 metres, there are no fish. There can't be.
No fish appears able to live below about 8,400 metres. The deepest ever filmed was a snailfish at roughly 8,300 metres, and biologists think the limit is chemical: the molecule…
And the things living near that line get strange fast…
- A male anglerfish merges with his mate. Permanently.
In several deep-sea anglerfish species the male, a fraction of the female's size, bites into her, fuses his tissue with hers and joins her bloodstream, wasting away into a…