The USS Johnston is no longer the deepest wreck found. That honor goes to another ship lost at the Battle Off Samar: the famous DE-413, USS Samuel B. Roberts.
"The crew were informed over the loud speaker system at the beginning of the action, of the Commanding Officer's estimate of the situation, that is, a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected, during which time we would do what damage we could. In the face of this knowledge the men zealously manned their stations wherever they might be, and fought and worked with such calmness, courage, and efficiency that no higher honor could be conceived than to command such a group of men."
Also, I didn't do the math, but I wonder if the claim that more people have been to the moon than the Hadal Zone is still true. Ironically, the same person that made the USS Johnston statement obsolete would also be responsible for that, because he made so many descents with different people.
I haven't done a lot of research, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadal_zone seems to suggest it really has only been a handful of people; Jaques Picard and John Walsh, James Cameron, and a few Chinese and Japanese explorers; even unmanned craft struggle to go down that far it seems.
Which... is kinda weird to me, like with space missions, I'd expect them to launch probes or permanent unmanned observation things down there. Surely they can transfer data through water efficiently enough?
I can imagine they don't want to use nuclear power (like a RTG) on those though, which limits lifetime. A cable going to the surface will be difficult as well, because of its own weight and currents.
> Surely they can transfer data through water efficiently enough?
Actually, no. Water absorbs most of the electromagnetic spectrum pretty well, severely limiting the communication range. So you're limited to low frequencies or acoustic communication. Both have a low bandwidth, so forget live video footage.
Should be within the realm of the possible to use a kevlar-reinforced umbilical with fiber optics in it going to a buoy on the surface, though. Starlink to the rescue!
I am not sure you would need that much bandwidth from down there, though - I really can't see that much happening that quickly at the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
What if you could "stereolitho-encode" a bunch of data in an image, then just send the image and let the receiving sub decode the image for the data, as opposed to a bunch of linear sonic-"packets"?
For example, what if the image was a pic of various graphs and stats of the status of the machine, but at the same time other critical information is encoded in the image of a Status-Page/Dashboard style KPI image?
It is likely I’ve missed something because your idea seems clever and mine is dumb, but what about just bundling all the data up together and then letting some compression algorithm take a swing at it. (Which is I’m sure what they do already)
I am saying that you can likely encapsulate a boat-load more pay-load in a small image, than if youre attempting to send blobs, timesequence, or other info - especially if your image is intercepted and itsa pic of your enemy's leader/flag/whatever and they have no idea what to do with the image...
Better yet, is if the image is of a flase map of current in-situ..
Why is it more likely that an image can store more information than just encoding the information directly in some format like binary? You have the added overhead of the actual image itself, now you have to transmit compress(bits(image) + bits(message)) when you could just do compress(bits(message)).
Originally the topic was undersea exploration. There’s no need for steganography, the issue is signal strength, not obscuring communications. There isn’t an enemy to intercept these messages.
I didnt realize that - I was just trying to convey, that mayhaps ; If a secrete message would be sent via Sonar, an image encoding might be efficient, such that the blok of info one wishes to convey, might be a really long stream, as opposed to encoded into an image which would result in shorter sonic comms...
According to the wikipedia page of the DSV Limiting Factor[1], "Over 21 people have visited Challenger Deep, the deepest area on Earth, in the DSV". This is just aboard the Limiting Factor, and doesn't include the descent of the Trieste (2 people), Deepsea Challenger (1 person), and Fendouzhe (3 people), totaling at least 27 who have been to the Challenger deep.
It looks like now, at least 3 more people have been to the Challenger Deep than have been to the moon (24 orbited it, only 12 landed on it).
The sheer depth of course is astounding, and the fact that life can exist at such depths is also astounding, but the most astounding thing to me is to see terrestrial animals diving hundreds of meters, and aquatic mammals diving thousands, and moreover large creatures like sharks apparently living comfortably in the upper and middle regions of the midnight zone, alongside the skeletal and bioluminescent creatures we usually think of as inhabiting that area. Why?! What revolutionary pressure selected for the ability to dive hundreds of meters underwater from the surface or close to it, presumably to where food is more scarce? Is it easier to hunt down there? Less competition from less highly adapted animals? It seems like such an extreme adaptation that you have to presume it predates our modern familiar species of penguins, pinnipeds and cetacea.
The deep scattering layer which is made up of various organisms from planktonic to laternfish and larger squid undergoes a diel vertical migration from near the surface at night to well into the mesopelagic zone (200-1000m) during the day, and while the ultimate driver involves illuminance, the evolutionary pressures are complex and involve bottom up and top down forcing (e.g. following food or avoiding predators).
Higher trophic level predators have adapted to bounce dive or undergo their own DVM to match and have to deal with cold, low oxygen (although hypoxia can be ecologically limiting in some areas), but the pressure, which isn't that big of a deal especially if you have limited air spaces.
Once you can dive to 600-1000 m the pressure differential is not that much greater to go a bit deeper compared to at shallower depths (relative difference between 800-1600 m is the same as 0-10m).
There appear to be other functional behaviours besides foraging that push the physiological limits of these animals, for example the webpage has the typical daytime depths of swordfish of 550m which is accurate and they will stay there from dawn to dusk typically, but very rarely they will bounce dive 1000m - 1400m+. Possibly, although not confirmed, related to the need to calibrate navigational faculties.
As a thought exercise, what evolutionary pressure drove deep sea creatures to make the tremendous effort required to leave the depths of the ocean in the first place?
This would be even better if you could click on the various creatures you encounter to get their Wikipedia articles.
That said, this is pretty cool. It's made me think how for humans and many other animals, moving 10, 100, even thousands of kilometers horizontally is not a very big deal. But move vertically, and you effectively find yourself in a different world within as little as a few hundred meters.
A few hundred meters? Even 10 meters under the water feels like an inhospitable alien world, likely to induce a minor sense of panic if you look up and contemplate the amount of water between you and the surface.
I used to swim in an Olympic-sized pool with a depth of 10 feet (3m) at one end. I could hold my breath and swim down to the bottom for a minute maybe, and looking around, it was definitely a lot of water. I could feel the pressure even there.
I also went snorkeling in Hawaii once in cove that had deep areas easily over 10m. Even looking down at that depth could be disorienting and anxiety-inducing.
A hundred meters is technical SCUBA diving depth. A few hundred meters is where military subs hang out, and not much below. A kilometer is crush depth for all but the sturdiest military submarines and special deep-diving vehicles.
I grew up with a Swim Club, and our pool went to 12' deep - and just getting to the drain at the center of the deep-end hurt my ears so bad, that it was an effort.
I can pop my ears at will in Air, but underwater, at 12' the pain is intense, and I cant normalize. I couldnt imagine say, 30' deep or anything more.
> That said, this is pretty cool. It's made me think how for humans and many other animals, moving 10, 100, even thousands of kilometers horizontally is not a very big deal. But move vertically, and you effectively find yourself in a different world within as little as a few hundred meters.
This observation reminded me of 'Dragon's Egg', the SF novel about a civilization on the surface of a neutron star. Because of the intense magnetic field, movement in the east-west direction was easy but very difficult in the north-south direction.
> During the descent [of the Trieste to the Challenger Deep], one of the window panes cracked and shook the entire vessel.
... and still they did not abort the dive. In fact, they continued to go even deeper. Think about that for a second.
That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of. No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years. I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today.
> Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance.
There was nothing abstract whatsoever about the lack of adequate preparation and responsibility taken: they did not certify, and they used components that were not rated for the depths of their dives, among many other things. This was not ignorance. This was boldly deciding not to care about safety. They ignored very vocal and direct outspoken concerns from all their peers in the industry for years, specific concerns about what they were doing that was not safe, and they ignored that too. Not abstract.
Stockton assured passengers that it was totally safe. Either he was lying, or he deluded himself enough that he found the risk to be abstract.
A reckless teenager driving at 120mph on the highway with no seatbelt is obviously in serious danger, but to their young, impulsive mind the danger may feel completely abstract.
I found this interesting enough to look into it a little more:
> At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside wasmore than 6 tons per sqare inch., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh.
Not to dismiss the guts of these explorers, but we have not been to the Moon in 50 years because it costs a fortune to get to when it's not much more than a floating rock (I'm being hyperbolic but the point is that there is no economic incentive to offset the cost). If we could get to it cheaply, but with a high risk of death, I'm sure many would be doing it right now.
In the "Deepsea Challenge" documentary (2014), Don Walsh (one of the two men that made the dive with Trieste) tells James Cameron that "if you can hear a crack it means you're still alive, might as well keep on with the dive" (paraphrasing).
So when Cameron is doing a test dive he hears a loud noise and indeed just keeps going.
Personally, I'd wet my pants right there and cry for my mother. These gentlemen are built different I guess.
I don't know why that's laudable: if you die before you make it back, for most of these locations, that means whatever you've learned is lost as well, and someone has to take identical risk to learn it for humanity again.
Seems to be better to see the cracked pane, return to the surface with your lives, write a letter to your submarine enthusiast magazine group or whatever the equivalent of a web forum was back then noting that such and such glass installed in such and such way cracked at N depth, try a new method, and dive again.
> No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years.
Why bother when the ocean is infinitely more interesting?
I was also amazed to read that the window was made of plexiglass:
> Observation of the sea outside the craft was conducted directly by eye, via a single, very tapered, cone-shaped block of Plexiglas, the only transparent substance identified which would withstand the external pressure.
It's possible that consciously or unconsciously they reasoned that a failure which compromised the vessels integrity would have been instantaneous and catastrophic, and thus the crack most likely was not compromising the vessels integrity.
Interesting point about the Trieste if nobody has mentioned it yet: The big part on top isn't where the crew goes, it's a tank of lighter-than-water liquid that regulates the buoyancy of the rest of the equipment. It's liquid instead of gas so it's incompressible and doesn't implode. The little ball on the bottom is where the people sat. So it's like an underwater Zeppelin.
Nitpick, the reason the float doesn't implode is because it's open at the bottom. As the gasoline (very slightly) contracts, seawater comes in. From the wikipedia article.
Interesting - I wonder if it's contracting because of the pressure or the temperature or both. I imagine it's probably pretty cold down there, and gasoline is known to expand and contract based on temperature.
Any idea on how to build this? I am thinking about doing the same for emperors and kings etc etc. Not sure if there is a framework of some sort or just js+css.
I love all his projects! The one called "spend Bill Gate's money" is really funny too. He also curates a site that collects similar fun projects
No need for a framework or anything of the sort as far as I see it. Establish your scale in some manner which can be converted to a distance relative to the top of the page and position the elements absolutely to their proportional position. You can use this same scale against the scrollY attribute to know where you are relative to the top (in this case for rendering the depth).
You could use intersection observer to check the position of an element.
I can't remember if there was a native way of doing it in CSS (for some reason it's stored in memory that it was recently added to CSS)... The closest is scroll snap.
Very cool. Does need to be updated since the deepest discovered shipwreck is no longer the USS Johnston[1] as of 2022.
> The wreck of Samuel B. Roberts lies at a depth of 6,895 meters (22,621 ft; 4.284 mi), making her the deepest known shipwreck and the deepest shipwreck ever identified by a crewed submersible. It exceeds the previous record of 6,469 meters (21,224 ft; 4.020 mi), set in March 2021 when Vescovo's team found and identified the wreck of the destroyer USS Johnston, which was sunk in the same battle.
How is it the structure of a ship, even thin bars of steel, can withstand the pressure of that depth? How many pounds per square inch would be applied here? Is the pressure a danger for submersibles because of the pressure differential rather than the pressure itself?
Pressure differential is definitely one of the bigger problems. In a manned submersible the interior pressure is usually roughly sea level. So you've got hundreds of atmospheres on the outside vs one of the inside. Anything that requires some pressure differential requires a strong pressure vessel. So not just the crew compartment but also camera housing and the like.
This is all compounded by the fact the deep ocean is very cold so as a submersible descends there's a thermal gradient with "survivable" on the inside and sun-zero on the outside. Temperature differentials interact with the pressures because the atmospheric pressure and low temperature will both cause material to compress/contract. The whole vessel structure needs to be able to remain structurally sound with all of that expansion and contraction.
The submersible is also in salt water which corrodes different materials and can cause electrical shorts. A submersible could have a few successful missions then fail because some corrosion was missed on an inspection.
Building a manned or unmanned device to travel to and return from an extreme environment is really hard. You need to understand or at least make educated guesses about the target environment, understand your building materials, your construction processes, validate and bench test as much as possible, and have the same amount of thought go into actual operations. "Fuck it we'll do it live" is not a recipe for success.
If the ship hulk is full of water, the pressure is on both sides. Worst that can happen to such a material is to be compressed, but metal is okay in that regard.
I kept being surprised seeing air-breathers deeper and deeper. I had no idea narwhals dove down to the depths where things live on hydro-thermal vents. Also that penguins have been near twice as deep as scuba divers.
The elephant seal really threw me for a loop, so I looked it up and [1]. It's not even close to accurate. I also couldn't verify any recorded dives of chinook salmon that deep either. A bit disappointing, this chart would be really cool if it was accurate
Down there it certainly seems to be the case. That said, it's critically important still; it's so remote and shielded, if the earth would be glassed or hit by a meteor, I'm confident life would persist in deep sea pockets and ecosystems. It may be low population, and their lifespans may be long and slow, but they'll survive.
If life could exist 10km below the ocean, I have strong gut feeling, we will find life deep inside the Jupiter thick atmosphere. Whatever depth that may be. It is like there is a FISH WITH WORKING EYE at 10km depth, so for much simplified multicellular organisms, limit could be even more extreme.
The problem I see with that line of thinking is that there's a long chain of evolution underpinning that fish living at 10km depth, it didn't pop into existence being able to live in that environment.
I do think finding extremophiles in the solar system is a distinct possibility (Titan seems like a good bet) but I'm doubtful any of it will be multicellular.
It's my understanding unicellular life popped up on Earth pretty much as soon as it had a non-lava surface. While Earth seems super friendly today it was incredibly hostile when life formed. Early life on Earth were all what we'd consider extremophiles or at least extreme-adjacent.
I'd bet (at least a small amount of money) that life, at least the most basic unicellular life, will pop up wherever the requisite materials exist in environments where they're not immediately destroyed but have enough external energy to facilitate some more energy intensive chemical reactions.
Jupiter's atmosphere (to me) seems just as likely a place for life to form as the surface of Titan. It would be harder for us to find that life since the environment is so demanding compared to our level of technology. The surface of Titan or Europa are much easier exploration targets relative to Jupiter's atmosphere.
I broadly agree on the timeline, but "as soon as it had a non-lava surface" is still plus/minus a couple hundred Mya. I do believe temperate conditions were a requirement. I doubt the first cell membranes, for instance, were terribly robust.
Life in the deepest ocean requires considerable adaptation. For example, the proteins in your body would cease to function at that pressure, denatured to uselessness. The proteins the life has there are adapted to resist this. The organisms also have solutes, like trimethylamine, that help proteins maintain their structure. Many deep sea organisms are unpalatable because they contain such chemicals.
Go to high enough pressure and the very polymers of life begin to break. It becomes energetically favorable for proteins to be decomposed to individual amino acids, due to their now exposed charged ends assisting in compressing water.
Fantastic, marine life is so amazing! I was also expecting to see the Limiting Factor which is another terrific submarine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Limiting_Factor), but I guess that the author only mentioned the Trieste as they were pioneers.
Awesome feature! Really like the simplicity of it. No super fancy animation, just enough data to keep you scrolling until the end. Your next coffee is on me ;)
"Hadal Zone" is also the name of an album by a fun acoustic guitar duo, Opal Ocean. Great for flamenco fans, and also those who enjoy the occasional 7/4 time signature. I found out about them at a festival in my smallish German city and they were a lovely surprise to the people around me, as well.
It's great, but the name of the creatures is too thin. I do not have the oswald font and it is using my system font instead, with a text weight of 100, gray and not full opacity, it is really hard to read. I suggest you set the weight to at least 200
I just finished reading "A Darkling Sea", which I highly recommend - set at the bottom of the ocean on an ice moon like Europa - where the humans involved face similar challenges as descending down into Earth's oceans.
Amazing. I am a reasonably educated person and I would've significantly underestimated the depths of most living creature representatives, based on my limited knowledge of pressure math.
I thought the same as well, but then seeing the titanic on it just made me think that the titanic is significantly more important than a crushed mass grave tourism sub next to it.
that’s so crazy to think about, imagine experiencing this as a biological body, I wonder how long it takes them to descend and ascend, just thinking about the prolonged water logging makes me claustrophobic
The ship's final action report:
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/NHC/NewPDFs/USN/Action%20re...
"The crew were informed over the loud speaker system at the beginning of the action, of the Commanding Officer's estimate of the situation, that is, a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected, during which time we would do what damage we could. In the face of this knowledge the men zealously manned their stations wherever they might be, and fought and worked with such calmness, courage, and efficiency that no higher honor could be conceived than to command such a group of men."