The Mariana Trench
- deep sea viper fish
I saw a story in the news today in Popular Science - UPDATE: Bush’s Tropical Paradise - about Bush creating the Mariana, Rose Atoll and Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monuments. As the story writes ....
This is truly a singular place, almost untouched by humans. These pristine reefs, atolls and islands teem with a spectacular array of life. It is one of few remaining places where top predators like sharks and tuna still swim in abundance, home to endangered sea turtles, hundreds of fish species, porpoises, humpback and pilot whales. 300 species of stony corals. Giant clams. Literally millions of seabirds and migratory shorebirds. This place is a living laboratory offering a peek into what reef communities looked like hundreds of years ago. The Mariana monument cradles the famous Mariana Trench, a geologic wonder nearly seven miles deep and five times as long as the soon-to-be-mined Grand Canyon. It also encompasses an acidic undersea that boils with submerged active volcanoes and thermal vents that house otherworldly, little-studied deep-sea species.
It's just so weird for me to like something Bush has done :) and I know that his foot dragging on global warming will harm the area anyway, but still, this is great! Here's a little about the Mariana Trench from Wikipedia ....
"The Mariana Trench (or Marianas Trench) is the deepest part of the world's oceans, and the deepest location on the surface of the Earth's crust. It has a maximum depth of about 11,033 meters (36,201 feet), and is located in the western North Pacific Ocean, to the east and south of the Mariana Islands, near Guam.
The trench forms the boundary between two tectonic plates, where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the small Mariana Plate. The bottom of the trench is farther below sea level than Mount Everest is above it (8,850m/29,035ft). At the bottom, the water column above exerts a pressure of 108.6 MPa, over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level."
You can read more about the Mariana Trench at Mariana Trench.com and you can read more about deep sea creatures here at Wikipedia, which has some great links at the bottom.
- deep sea angler fish
posted by crystal | 1:48 PM
16 Comments:
It is wonderful to see anything left on earth almost untouched by people.
Hi Paul - yeah, so far :)
Gosh, I'm in shock at the thought that Bush would do anything to protect wildlife. He seems to be making a mad dash to remove all environmental protections still remaining in the U.S...before he leaves office.
What an awesome place this must be! Thanks for sharing it! It's great to hear some good news for a change.
Firebird,
Yeah, Bush has been an enemy to the environment in so many ways, I was really surprised to see this.
Very cool pictures, Crystal. They look like they came out of Weird Tales.
Hi Liam. You should see the vampire squid :)
I always wondered how Dracula traveled at 30,000 ft below the sea.
Hey, how'd you get a photo of me all grumpy when I wake up in the morning?!?!? Oh, I see it's a "deep sea angler fish."
The other one looks like Mother from Alien.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi William,
Heh :) My sister and I spent half an hour looking at all the deep sea creatures' photos at the Monterey Aquarium's page.
O my gawd.. Bush did dat??!!
Yes, hard to believe :)
the pressure at that depth is 15,000 pounds per square inch, how could any living thing live in that kind of pressure?
Also, why do they have eyes? No light from the surface reaches to those depths, why would they evolve eyes? They would not be able to change the depths they live at too much, or the pressure differential would either crush them or make them explode.
Something is fishy about all these stories.
Fishy :)
sounds pretty fishy
hi .a man can reach to this place?
creeepppppyyyyyy
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