Mariana Trench: What China Found In The Deepest Place On Earth

The deepest point on Earth sits nearly 7

mi below the surface of the Pacific

Ocean. It is darker than any cave,

colder than most freezers, and the

pressure down there is strong enough to

crush a steel car like a soda can. For

most of human history, we had no idea

what was down there. And for a long

time, most scientists believed nothing

could survive it. Then China went down.

Not once, not twice, but dozens of

times. And what they pulled back up from

that darkness stunned the entire

scientific world. More than 7,000

species that no one had ever seen

before. Forests of creatures swaying in

water that has never once seen sunlight.

Life forms using chemistry instead of

the sun to survive. An evidence that

this hidden world had been thriving

quietly, completely unknown to us for

millions of years. But here is the part

that will really get you. The

discoveries China made at the bottom of

the Mariana Trench are not just about

the ocean. They are changing the way

scientists think about life on other

planets. Here is the full story.

The deepest place no one could reach.

The Mariana Trench is a giant crack in

the floor of the western Pacific Ocean,

sitting about 200 m southwest of a small

US island called Guam. It stretches for

about 1,580

mi from north to south, which makes it

longer than the entire width of the

United States from Chicago to Los

Angeles. But its length is not the

point. Its depth is at the very bottom

of the trench at a spot called

Challenger Deep. The ocean floor is

36,037

ft down. That is 10,984

m. Or if numbers are not your thing,

think of it this way. If you took the

tallest mountain on Earth, Mount

Everest, and dropped it into the trench,

the very top of that mountain would

still be buried more than one mile

underwater. That is how deep we are

talking. For most of the 1900s, humans

had almost no way to get down there. The

pressure at that depth is over 1,000

times greater than what we feel at the

surface. That is roughly 8 tons pressing

down on every single square in. To put

that in your hands, literally that is

the equivalent of having three

full-sized cars stacked on top of your

thumbnail. Your body would not last a

second without some kind of protection

that no regular vehicle could provide.

Two men reached the bottom in 1960 using

a vehicle that was basically a steel

ball attached to a massive floating tank

filled with gasoline. They spent 20

minutes at the bottom, saw a few

creatures moving slowly across the mud

and came back up with zero photos and

zero samples. Just two eyewitness

accounts and a lot of unanswered

questions. Then in 2012, filmmaker James

Cameron went down alone in a specially

built submarine called the Deep Sea

Challenger. He had cameras, he had

sampling equipment, he had modern

technology that the 1960 team could only

have dreamed about. And yet, when he

arrived at the bottom, he described it

as looking like the surface of the moon.

flat, gray, eerily still, barely any

sign of life beyond a few ghostly

shrimplike creatures drifting near the

sediment. That was the picture the world

had of Challenger Deep going into the

2010s,

a cold, dark, and largely empty

wasteland at the bottom of the sea. A

place so extreme that even with the best

equipment available, it had only been

visited by three humans in all of

recorded history. Most scientists

assumed that whatever secrets it held

were simply too deep, too dark, and too

hostile to ever be properly understood.

China was about to change that picture

completely.

China decides to go deep.

In the early 2000s, China made a

decision that most countries were not

thinking about. While a lot of the

world's scientific attention was pointed

upward at outer space, China turned its

focus toward inner space, the deep

ocean, specifically the places so far

below the surface that sunlight cannot

reach. Pressure can crush metal, and

most of the creatures living there do

not even have names yet. In 2002, China

launched an ambitious national program

with one clear goal. Build a manned

submersible that could reach depths of

7,000 meters and bring back real

scientific data. A submersible is

basically a small underwater vehicle

built to survive extreme pressure.

Building one that could go that deep was

not just an engineering challenge. It

was more like solving a puzzle where

every single wrong piece could get

someone killed. The hull had to be

strong enough to resist pressure that

would crumple ordinary steel. The

electronics had to function in near

freezing temperatures. The life support

systems had to keep a crew alive for

hours with no connection to the surface.

The first result of that program was a

submersible called the Gaolong, which

means sea dragon in Chinese. It took

nearly a decade to design, build, and

test. Engineers ran hundreds of

simulations. They tested materials that

had never been used in underwater

vehicles before. They rebuilt components

that failed and tested them again until

the numbers were right. In 2012, after

all that work, the Jaolong reached a

depth of 7,062 m in the Mariana Trench.

That made it the deepest diving manned

submersible in the world at that time,

overtaking vehicles from the United

States, Japan, France, and Russia in a

single dive. But China did not stop

there. That is the part of this story

that most people outside of the

scientific community do not know. The

Jaolong was not the destination. It was

the starting point. Over the next

several years, China kept building and

improving. They designed a second

submersible called the Shanghai Yongshi,

which means deep sea warrior. It was

faster, more reliable, and carried

better instruments than the Jaoong.

Scientists used it to explore mid-depth

ocean trenches and refine the techniques

they would need for something much more

ambitious. Then they built the Fendua,

which means stver. It was designed from

the ground up to reach the very bottom

of Challenger Deep and stay there long

enough to do serious science. Not 20

minutes, not 3 hours. Real extended

methodical exploration. It was fitted

with highdefinition cameras, robotic

sampling arms, water collection tools,

and instruments that could measure

temperature, chemistry, and biological

activity on the seafloor in real time.

China had gone from having no deep sea

submersible program at all to building

three generations of increasingly

capable vehicles in less than 20 years.

And now, the Striver was ready to go all

the way down.

The Strivever reaches the bottom of the

world.

On November 10th, 2020, the Fendu

descended to 10,99

m in the Challenger Deep that placed it

among the deepest crude dives ever

recorded on Earth. Three crew members

sat inside a titanium sphere roughly the

size of a small bathroom, sealed off

from the outside world, while the

vehicle sank through total darkness for

about 4 hours. Think about what that

actually feels like. 4 hours of descent.

The ocean outside getting heavier and

colder with every passing minute. No

sunlight, no radio signal, no way to

communicate with the surface. Just three

humans in a titanium ball dropping

through miles of water that most of the

planet has never seen and never will.

And when something goes wrong down

there, which it can, there is no rescue

team that can reach you in time. But the

Fendu was built for exactly this. When