Why is the Marianas Trench the deepest place on Planet Earth? A look beneath the ocean

lived on Guam for a while right next to the shore. go snorkling and you would end up looking down and see this edge that just kept going down . very creepy. sometimes at night when it was very quiet you might hear distant thunder actually it was giant boulders falling down the edge of this endless cliff.

What's odd to think is that what used to be life is possibly 400 km deep into the Earth by now.

It wasn't enough that you had sand models, Google Earth tours and Paint Diagrams. No, you had to go represent the Earth's mantle with green. Now I have to like this channel even more. ;)

[Draws volcano] "Nothing too bad. They got everyone out of there in time." - Philip Prince, 2024.

It never occurred to me that the lithosphere stops sinking. I thought it went down and just blended into the mantle... wow. Love it when my mental model gets corrected. Edit: So, is the mantle just "paved" with all these relics of lithosphere that has subducted?

Litke Deep is closer to the earth's core than Challenger deep by 9.2 miles. It's because of the oblate spheroid shape of the planet Earth, which is flatter at poles and thicker at the equator. However, by depth below sea level, Litke Deep is not the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean.

I enjoyed the video and I learned a little bit too. Thanks! I subscribed

As I'm sitting in my living room watching this on my phone you remind me of high school science class. I absolutely hated school but I loved science, you remind me of one of those cool teachers that really cared and taught things in a way to make it interesting and make you want to learn more. Thank you, I love learning about geography and the history of things. 👍👍

Interesting. Not a geologist but a former resident of Saipan who was always curious about the Trench and the Deep. The big piece for me was the age of the sinking plate. FYI, I was in Saipan when the had their last 7.x earthquake and it was a real long minute. Anatahan which hadn't errupted in 20,000 yrs also happened while I was there. The vog turned the morning to night in about a hour. Interesting section of the world geologically.

Excellent presentation. There are some rather significant issues with the traditional interpretation of the Pacific Plate in the region of Marianas Trench, however. In general, it is simply described as the Pacific plate forming at a ridge and moving under other plates such as in this region. However, this is based off the models of oceanic crustal age such as by Muller et al. that are largely based off of isochron lines. There have been studies of East Mariana Basin where drill samples are anomalously low in age in the region. One such example is "East Mariana Basin tholeiites: Cretaceous intraplate basalts or rift basalts related to the Ontong Java plume?" by Castillo et al. where they conclude the East Mariana Basin basalts to be distinct from the Jurassic basalts of Pigafetta Basin to the north, but to have a similar isotopic signature to the basalts of Ontong Java and Manihiki Plateaus and also indistinguishable from the basalts found at Nauru Basin dated to ~111Ma (the region east of the Mariana Trench is generally claimed to be significantly older). There are no studies (to the best of my knowledge--I certainly could not find any) that found Jurassic basement rock below the anomalous Cretaceous crust of the East Mariana Basin--all samples from the region show purely Cretaceous layers. The magnetic anomaly patterns would predict the igneous basement of these regions to be Jurassic, which is the basis by which the interpretation of the formation of Marianas Trench is formulated. As a result, this data appears inadequately explained by present descriptions of the formation of the Marianas Trench due to its relationship to East Mariana Basin by physical proximity and by the claimed process for the formation of the Marianas Trench.

If Guam tips over, those people are in some seriously deep water.

I remember seeing a tech demo several years of a home-made plate tectonics computer model. He said the trick to making it work was "old oceanic crust must die". And with that implemented, it did seem to produce rather plausible plate tectonics! Also I guess this is a good place to state my little 15 seconds of fame moment, I worked as a calibration tech at a company that manufactured physical oceanography sensors and I pre- and post-calibrated a few sensors that James Cameron took with him to the bottom of Challenger Deep in 2013.

This was really well done. I've been looking at that trench and pondering about it for many years.

18:40 From one MS Paint user to another. Use the Fill tool to change the color of a contained area. The "deep ocean" color you could have filled that area instead of brushing it blue. Same when you drew the subducting plate, you could have filled the black after setting the outer boundaries.

That's one of the best diagrams of subduction I've ever seen, and you just freehanded it in MS paint while we watched.

9:20 I love the rollback animation

Good explanation video! I actually got a chance to swim over the Marianas Trench one time while I was in the Navy.

amazing vid, thanks for putting it together

As international viewer it would definitely help to have text in metric onscreen for each time you use imperial units.

I love the amateurish way you use paint to tell your story. It has a lot of charm to it. But more important: I learned something new today. Thank you.