- 2天前
The Mariana Trench is deep enough to swallow Everest and flatten shockwaves from 12,000 nuclear bombs — yet a plastic bag got there first. Between the Trieste's 1960 dive, Cameron's lonely descent, and China's Fendouzhe discovering a 9,500-metre ecosystem that never sees sunlight, one unsettling question remains: are we reading this archive, or mining it for parts?
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00:00Someone once calculated what would happen if you took every nuclear weapon on earth.
00:03All 12,000 of them.
00:04And dumped them into the Mariana Trench at the same time.
00:07And set them off.
00:08What happens?
00:09The combined blast would be roughly 500,000 times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
00:13Enough to crack a continent open.
00:15And the result?
00:16The ocean would throw up a single enormous wave.
00:18And the vibration felt on the surface would be less than an ordinary earthquake.
00:22Because the trench is just that deep.
00:2411 kilometers deep.
00:25Deep enough that if you dropped Mount Everest into it, the peak would still be 2 kilometers underwater.
00:29At that depth, the water pressure would crush the shockwave flat.
00:32Squeeze it out of existence before it ever reached the surface.
00:35So 12,000 nuclear weapons could not punch through that darkness.
00:38But you know what did?
00:39A plastic bag.
00:41When scientists went down, they found it.
00:43At the deepest place on earth.
00:45A plastic bag, floating there.
00:47Along with a candy wrapper.
00:48And worse than that.
00:50When they dissected the creatures living down there, almost every single one had plastic inside its body.
00:54Our garbage got there faster, deeper, and more completely than every nuclear weapon ever built.
00:58And we still don't even know what lives down there.
01:00So where is the Mariana Trench?
01:02It sits in the western Pacific, about 320 kilometers southwest of Guam.
01:06Seen from above, it's a curved star.
01:08Running north to south.
01:102,550 kilometers long.
01:12Roughly the distance from London to Cairo.
01:14But what actually makes your skin crawl isn't the length.
01:17It's the depth.
01:18The deepest point is called Challenger Deep.
01:20Nearly 11,000 meters down.
01:22The pressure there is 1100 times the pressure at the surface.
01:25To put that in perspective, it's like stacking a hundred grown elephants on top of a single fingernail.
01:29And it's not pressing down from above.
01:31It's closing in from every direction at once.
01:33A steel submarine sent to that depth would be folded like a paper cup.
01:36A human body wouldn't even get that far.
01:38It would be flattened, then the bones would be crushed to powder.
01:41And there would be no pain.
01:43Because you would never have time to feel it.
01:44It would be over in an instant.
01:46For a very long time, scientists were convinced that nothing could live in a place like that.
01:50No sunlight.
01:51No oxygen.
01:53No warmth.
01:54Enough pressure to destroy every organic structure known to us.
01:57But humans have this instinct.
01:58The more you're told there is nothing down there, the more you want to go and see it for yourself.
02:02January 23, 1960.
02:04Two men made a decision that many people considered suicide.
02:07A United States Navy Lieutenant, Don Walsh, and a Swiss engineer, Jacques Piccard,
02:11climbed into a steel sphere less than 2 meters across, sealed the hatch, and began to sink.
02:15Their submersible was called the Trieste.
02:17The descent took nearly 5 hours.
02:19At 9,000 meters, the hull let out a loud crack.
02:22The observation window developed a fracture.
02:24The two men looked at each other.
02:26Said nothing for several seconds.
02:27Then kept going down.
02:29At 1.06 in the afternoon, they touched the bottom.
02:32The depth was 10,916 meters.
02:34The temperature inside had dropped to near freezing.
02:36They were shaking.
02:38Sitting in a pitch-black cabin with only 20 minutes to stay.
02:40And then Piccard looked through the window and saw a fish.
02:43A flatfish, drifting quietly over the sediment.
02:46He froze.
02:47That couldn't be.
02:48That meant the scientists were wrong.
02:50That meant that in the most extreme environment on this planet, life not only existed.
02:54It was doing just fine.
02:55But all that dive left behind was the testimony of two men.
02:58No photographs.
02:59No specimens.
03:01No data of any kind.
03:02When they surfaced, some scientists simply refused to believe them.
03:05They insisted that fish could not possibly live at that depth.
03:08And then, for 52 years, nobody went back down.
03:1152 years.
03:13Not because nobody was interested.
03:15Because it was too difficult.
03:16Too dangerous.
03:17Too expensive.
03:19During all that time, the Mariana Trench just sat there.
03:22Quietly holding secrets humanity had no idea about.
03:24Until 2012.
03:26March 26th.
03:27The director of Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron, climbed alone into a single-seat submersible
03:31shaped like a torpedo, and started to descend.
03:34He wasn't there to shoot a movie.
03:35He brought scientific cameras.
03:37He brought sampling equipment.
03:39He wanted real data.
03:40The dive took two and a half hours.
03:42He sat alone in a space so cramped he couldn't stretch out, watching the darkness outside get
03:46deeper.
03:46And deeper.
03:47When he reached the bottom, Cameron said something on camera.
03:50He said it looked like the surface of the moon.
03:52Desolate.
03:53Not the swarming life he had expected.
03:55Just endless gray sediment, and pale translucent shrimp drifting above the mud, barely moving at all.
03:59But the sediment samples he brought back changed things.
04:02Laboratory analysis found 68 entirely new species, most of them bacteria.
04:06He also filmed microbial mats covering the rocks.
04:09Organisms living by chemosynthesis.
04:11Not sunlight.
04:12Chemical energy seeping up from beneath the seafloor.
04:15That discovery set off a huge debate in the scientific community.
04:18Because it meant that life does not actually need the sun.
04:21Three hours later, the ballast was released and Cameron was pulled back up.
04:24He had the data, but no time to stay.
04:26The darkness took its secrets back.
04:27The person who really broke the door open was a retired United States Navy officer.
04:31Victor Vescovo.
04:33In 2019, he piloted a submersible down to 35,853 feet.
04:3710,928 meters.
04:39Breaking the deepest dive record in history.
04:42But he wasn't satisfied with one dive.
04:44He went down again and again.
04:45Becoming the first person to reach Challenger Deep multiple times.
04:48His team found four brand new species of amphipods on the seafloor.
04:52They filmed sea cucumbers crawling across the sediment.
04:54And deposits and colors that don't belong in the deep sea at all.
04:57Proof that geological activity is still going on down there.
05:00A place everyone assumed was dead.
05:02Still moving.
05:03And then he saw the plastic bag.
05:05Just floating there on the seafloor.
05:07Nearly 11 kilometers below the surface.
05:09Later, he said that was the single thing from the whole expedition that silenced him.
05:12Not fear.
05:14Something harder to name.
05:15His team sent the creatures they collected to a lab.
05:18The conclusion, almost every animal had microplastics inside it.
05:21Humans hadn't even begun to understand this place.
05:23And we had already delivered our trash to it.
05:25Then, in 2021, China's fendus arrived.
05:2833 dives.
05:30More than 1600 samples collected.
05:32Analysis of the sediment turned up over 7000 new species of microorganisms.
05:3689% of them never seen by science before.
05:38And that still isn't the most shocking part.
05:40At nearly 9500 meters, scientists found massive colonies of tube worms, and dense beds of eye valves.
05:46So many of them that the researchers described this site as a river of life.
05:49It's the deepest, largest chemosynthetic ecosystem ever found.
05:52Completely independent of sunlight.
05:54Tube worms have no mouth.
05:56No gut.
05:57Specialized bacteria inside their bodies turn sulfur compounds into energy, and keep them alive.
06:02That single finding overturned a core assumption that had sat in biology textbooks for decades.
06:06There is also a creature called the Mariana snailfish.
06:08Found at 8360 meters.
06:11The deepest fish ever recorded.
06:13Its body is almost transparent.
06:15Its skeleton isn't hard bone.
06:16It's cartilage.
06:17And it has no swim bladder at all, because the swim bladder would explode at that pressure.
06:21It didn't resist the pressure.
06:23It evolved to dissolve it.
06:24When scientists studied its genome, they found a unique stabilizing mechanism that stops proteins
06:28from breaking down under extreme pressure.
06:30Nothing else on earth has it.
06:32There is also an amphipod nearly 10 times larger than normal.
06:35Researchers call it the supergiant amphipod.
06:37When they dissected it, they found aluminium in its outer shell.
06:39It is the first known animal on the planet that actively pulls aluminium into its own body structure.
06:44It extracts aluminium from the sediment to reinforce its shell.
06:47Nature evolved a chemical engineering process more precise than any materials lab humans have
06:51ever built.
06:51So what is actually down there in the Mariana Trench?
06:54Life that should be impossible.
06:56Ecosystems running without sunlight.
06:58Species that don't even have names yet.
07:00Geological evidence left by a moving earth.
07:02Clues that might point to the origin of life itself.
07:04And our own garbage.
07:06Scientists now have a hypothesis.
07:08That the first life on earth may not have begun in sunlight, in some shallow warm pool.
07:12But in a deep sea hydrothermal vent.
07:14Assembled in the dark, out of chemistry.
07:16If that hypothesis holds, then the Mariana Trench isn't just the deepest place on earth.
07:20It could be the birthplace of life on earth.
07:22Meanwhile, governments have already moved on to something else.
07:25Deep sea resources.
07:27Polymetallic nodules on the seafloor.
07:28Vast amounts of manganese, nickel, cobalt.
07:31The core raw materials for batteries and electric vehicles.
07:34And methane hydrate.
07:35It looks like ice.
07:36You can set it on fire.
07:38Estimates put the total energy in those deposits higher than all the oil, coal and gas on earth combined.
07:43Whoever masters the extraction technology first controls the entry ticket to the next energy era.
07:47And even more quietly, more than 95% of the world's internet data travels through undersea fiber optic cables.
07:52Millions of kilometers of them, laid across the deep sea floor.
07:55Cut them, and global finance, communications, and military command all go dark at once.
08:00To control the deep sea is to control the nervous system of the modern world.
08:03This isn't science fiction.
08:05It's geopolitics, happening right now.
08:07But before this competition even properly started, one question still has no answer.
08:11We don't know what lives down there.
08:12How many.
08:13How it works.
08:14And we are already discussing how to mine it.
08:16What does that look like?
08:18It looks like a person finding an ancient library, and planning to tear out the shelves and sell the wood
08:22before ever reading a single page.
08:23The Mariana Trench is still there.
08:25It doesn't care what we think of it.
08:27It has existed on this planet for 170 million years.
08:30It was already there when the dinosaurs were alive.
08:32And it will keep existing, no matter what we do to it.
08:35But we only have one Earth.
08:36And only one Mariana Trench.
08:38What's written down there might be the last archive this planet ever left for us.
08:41Do we read it?
08:42Or do we burn it?
08:43Combine, Marc이다, Mac Reverse to producer, and Vors eso.
08:43While день back or leaps that持торов Hex or desk.
08:43Now, you're and Max, and I can remember before the memorial yep.
08:44Well done, and still got lots of secrets.