• Question: What's at the bottom of the ocean?

    Asked by 455xygg52 to Gavin, Karen, Mark, Michel, Roisin on 15 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Michel Destrade

      Michel Destrade answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      James Cameron, the director of Titanic, did a deep dive a couple of years ago. He found that it was dark and cold (you bet!). Probably many cadavers of big fish and weird creatures who can sustain the huge pressures. But it looked mostly dark and cold. Also the geography is amazing, with valleys and mountains and deep canyons.

    • Photo: Roisin Jones

      Roisin Jones answered on 16 Nov 2016:

      I think Michel has covered this one very well: the basic answer is that we don’t know a lot about what’s at the bottom of the ocean. In fact, more people have been to outer space than have been to the deepest spots in the ocean! The deepest part of the ocean is called the Mariana Trench in the Pacific ocean, and the deepest part of that is called Challenger Deep, which is just under 11000m deep: that’s about 2000m deeper than Mt. Everest is tall!

      There have only been two manned missions to the Challenger Deep, one of which was the James Cameron one mentioned by Michel, and only four unmanned missions. All the missions reported the sea bed as being oozy, almost jelly-like sand, and they didn’t report seeing any fish or sea creatures as we would imagine them. Instead they saw sea cucumbers, worms and shrimp, and collected a lot of samples that turned out to contain a lot of very tiny, very simple organisms. Hope this answers your question! 🙂

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