UNH Ocean Scientists Shed New Light on Mariana Trench
Baku, February 11 (AZERTAC). An ocean mapping expedition has shed new light on the deepest place on Earth, the 2,500-kilometer long Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean near Guam.
Using a multibeam echo sounder, state-of-the-art equipment for mapping the ocean floor, scientists from the University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center found four “bridges” spanning the trench and measured its deepest point with greater precision than ever before.
Mapping the entire Mariana Trench - approximately 400,000 square kilometers -- from August through October 2010, the researchers discovered four bridges spanning the trench and rising as high as 2,500 meters above its floor.
It’s incredibly complex geology. These seamounts haven’t been completely sub ducted, they’re getting jammed up against the plate,” Gardner says. He surmises that the bridges are related to earthquake sebduction zones, such as the one that caused the March 2011 earthquake in Japan.
On 23 January 1960, the Swiss-designed bathyscaphe Trieste, originally built in Italy and acquired by the U.S. Navy, descended to the ocean floor in the trench manned by Jacques Piccard (who co-designed the submersible along with his father, Auguste Piccard) and USN Lieutenant Don Walsh. Their descent took almost five hours and the two men spent barely twenty minutes on the ocean floor before undertaking the three-hour-and-fifteen-minute ascent.
Only three descents have ever been achieved.
In 1995 the Japanese robotic deep-sea probe Kaiko broke the depth record for unmanned probes when it reached close to the surveyed bottom of the Challenger Deep. Created by the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, it was one of the few unmanned deep-sea probes in operation that could dive deeper. Kaiko also collected sediment cores containing marine organisms from the bottom of the deep.
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