You never really think too much about time unless you are late, planning an event, or even setting your alarm clock. It generally is understood that it exists and we, as a society, keep track of it through clocks, watches, conversations, and agendas.
When you get accepted to sail on the JOIDES Resolution, you understand that you are going to work 12 hours under the time zone the ship is chosen to follow. However, time starts to become more and more relative the longer you are on the ship.
The first moment where you notice that the way you interact with time is different to the way you interact with it on land is when the only greeting you hear is “Good morning!”. The ship operates 24/7, which means that there are 4 different shifts for the 118 crew members to work. Your morning can be midnight, 6pm, 6am, or midday, and thus anytime you see someone for the first time that day you greet them with good morning.
This is not initially detrimental to your concept of time, but compound it with the fact that your 12 hour shift isn’t wholly during daylight hours. While the midnight to midday or midday to midnight both are split almost in half by daytime and night time, the 6pm to 6am does not experience that. The 6pm to 6am shift wakes up to night as their morning, and works through their shift as it spans across two calendar days. Their today is tomorrow as well, and they go to bed after sunrise making their tomorrow start tonight. The most similar to land time is the 6am to 6pm shift, but very rarely do more than 4 people get to work that shift, but even then time is still a little wonky since you still interact with onshore colleagues that are not in the same timezone as you.
Timezones become a regular part of how you think because you have onshore family, friends, and work colleagues that are in a different time zone from you. Plus, shipboard computers are always at UTC but shipboard clocks and watches are on the current timezone we are sailing in. For instance, we are sailing in the Italian time zone, UTC + 1. Add in the fact that as the outreach officer I have to schedule ship to shore broadcasts for a global audience, I have to discern what time zone the 3pm that someone wants to book an appointment is in compared to mine. The mental gymnastics become especially interesting when the time zone differences leads to it being my tomorrow but their evening. For instance, 7 pm EST for someone in New York, USA on March 22 is the ship’s 12am March 23.
As our shifts extend into different days, being able to talk about what day it is becomes even harder. A lot of times we just say “two days from now” or “ when you wake up next” instead of identifying the actual day as Monday or Friday. This very likely is heightened by the fact that a lot of our day is monotonous, once described as ground hog day. Wake up – eat – work- eat- work – eat- social time- sleep- REPEAT. Give or take the sunset or sunrise.
I am not the only one that experiences time as a weird social construct when on the ship, it is a shared by my crew members.
Brandon, one of the physical properties specialists on board, mentioned that the only way he knows it was the weekend was due to the fact that he gets less emails than usual. Tori, one of the Paleomagnetists on board, pointed out that the language we use to identify meal time is even lost. When trying to invite someone to take a break for lunch, it could be your first meal but their second meal and the kitchen’s third meal cooked that day, and thus you are left to say “Meal time?”. Don’t forget that the only crew members that get breakfast food like eggs or oatmeal for their first meal is the 6am to 6pm shift, which is not ideal for Brandon who really enjoys some bacon in the morning. So you can’t really use the kind of food you have to develop an understanding of time passing.
As much as time, when on the ship, is endless or a black hole or far from reality, it is cherished by the crew members. We create unique bonds of friendship, and find ways to provide variability as the days drone on. During expedition 402 we had a hot wing competition, wellness wednesday movie night, a talent show, and more. We make do with time on the ship, even if we are confused about what day or time it is.
Our ocean is an incredibly vast and mysterious place. And there is no place where that is more evident than the deepest ocean area in the world: the legendary Mariana Trench. Located east of the Philippines, the Mariana Trench lies in the Mariana Archipelago in the western portion of the North Pacific. The greater area of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument is made up of more than 95,000 square miles of ocean. Beneath these waters lie incredibly complex aggregations of submerged islands and volcanoes … and of course, an astoundingly massive trench.
Dive in with us to have your biggest questions answered about the famed Mariana Trench.
How deep is the Mariana Trench?
The deepest part of the Mariana Trench, known as Challenger Deep, is almost 36,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. For context, Mount Everest is about 29,000 feet above sea level, so the Mariana Trench is about 7,000 feet deeper than Mount Everest is tall. For one more comparison, the RMS Titanic lies at a depth of about 12,500 feet below sea level. The Challenger Deep is in waters nearly three times deeper than this ship’s final resting place.
Due to its enormous size, the Mariana Trench has at times been affectionately nicknamed the Grand Canyon of the ocean. This is certainly a picturesque image, but don’t let the mammoth size of this U.S. national terrestrial park fool you into thinking the Mariana Trench matches its size. The trench’s footprint is estimated to be 120 times larger than the Grand Canyon’s, and to reach the bottom of Challenger Deep, you’d need to descend through almost six Grand Canyons stacked on top of each other before you’d reach the seafloor.
Oh … and did we mention it’s five times wider than it is deep? It’s about 43 miles wide!
What is Challenger Deep, and how long would it take to reach it?
Challenger Deep is the deepest point of the Mariana Trench. Fewer than 30 people have ever journeyed to this area. The trek below the surface is long, dark and time-consuming, and it’s not an expedition considered lightly by scientists and explorers.
The first people to descend into the depths of this area in 1960 were oceanographers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, and it took them close to five hours to reach Challenger Deep. Since then, more advanced submersibles have been created, but it still takes two to four hours for modern vessels to reach such depths. For example, explorer and filmmaker James Cameron reached the seafloor in a little more than 2.5 hours in the first documented solo submarine dive to the area, and it took oceanographer Dr. Dawn Wright about four hours in 2022. It is crucial that these submersibles descend slowly and steadily beneath the surface, as the immense water pressure compounds with every mile a submersible descends. Speaking of pressure …
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What is the water pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
If you thought the depth of the Mariana Trench was its only jaw-dropping feature, think again. Water pressure is one of the most important factors affecting deep-sea life. In the ocean, pressure increases by one atmosphere for every 33 feet (10 meters) of depth. One atmosphere (a unit of measurement for pressure equivalent to average air pressure at sea level) is equal to about 14.7 pounds per square inch (PSI), which is the approximate standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. If you were to convert atmospheric pressure into weight, one atmosphere is about the weight of a bowling ball. Stay with me, friends.
If a vessel were to dive 2,000 feet below the surface, the pressure would equal that of 60 bowling balls stacked atop every square inch of that submersible. But 60 bowling balls is simply nothing compared to the pressure in the Mariana Trench. The atmospheric pressure at the depths of Challenger Deep is equal to about 16,000 PSI. That pressure is about the same as the weight of an entire full-grown elephant on every square inch of a submersible!
Need a more extreme comparison? If a human were to be placed at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the pressure would be equal to that of 50 jumbo jets piled on top of a person!
Do any animals live in the Mariana Trench?
The depths of the Mariana Trench come with immense pressure and extreme darkness, but somehow, life finds a way to survive. Organisms that live at an extreme depth, like that of Challenger Deep, have to be highly adapted to low temperatures (typically just above freezing), high pressure and virtually no light at all.
Species found in the depths of the Mariana Trench might look vastly different from animals from other ocean depths because their anatomy has been refined to thrive in harsh conditions. At such great depths, these animals typically depend on chemosynthesis (using nutrient-rich waters being pumped out of hydrothermal vents) or descending detritus (dead matter that has fallen from higher parts of the ocean) for food, such as whale falls. Just a handful of these animals include species of octopuses and squids, sea cucumbers, amphipods, sea jellies, shrimp, sea worms and some wild-looking fish!
In 2025, more than 7,000 new species were discovered in the Mariana Trench, including the hadal snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei). This is the deepest-dwelling fish currently known to science. Now, the fish has been dubbed “the Mariana snailfish.”
How was the Mariana Trench formed?
The process by which the Mariana Trench was created is a geologically fascinating one known as subduction. On the Earth’s surface, there are thin plates that cover the planet’s mantle, which is made of molten rock. If two of these plates collide, one pushes down into the Earth’s mantle while the other is pushed over the bottom plate. When this happens, a trench is formed from the drag of the bottom plate. This process can sometimes create incredibly strong earthquakes. The plates that forged the Mariana Trench’s creation are estimated to be up to approximately 180 million years old.
This trench was unknown to scientists until 1875. It was then that a team of explorers on the HMS Challenger measured the depth of the sea by simply lowering a weighted rope into the water. They were baffled when they measured that first portion of the seafloor to be five miles below the surface. And so was born the origin of some of the most daring deep-sea explorations known to mankind to date.
Is the Mariana Trench protected?
The Mariana Trench is in waters off Guam and the Mariana Islands. The region is protected from some human activities under its status as a marine monument. The creation of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument signified that international, national and local leaders all recognize the importance of protecting this area.
However, just because the region is protected does not mean it’s not vulnerable to modern threats to ocean health. Plastic bags have been spotted in the Mariana Trench during several expeditions, highlighting the far-reaching impact of the marine debris problem. No corner of our ocean is safe from the ever-present threat of plastic pollution. The reality of a changing climate makes the future well-being of wondrous places like the Mariana Trench uncertain. What’s more: More than 70% of the global ocean has yet to be mapped. And what we don’t yet know about, we cannot wisely work to protect.
It’s up to us to work together to defend our ocean, from the sandy shores of our favorite beaches to the deepest, darkest parts of the sea. Together, we can work to protect our ocean as a whole, which ultimately helps protect treasured places like Challenger Deep.
Find out how you can join Ocean Conservancy’s wave of momentum to secure a healthy ocean and a thriving planet, forever and for everyone!
The post The Mysteries of the Mariana Trench appeared first on Ocean Conservancy.
Intro
At the western tip of Luzon, which is the biggest island of the Philippines, lies the small coastal town of Bolinao. Tourists seldom find their way here as it takes around seven hours to get here by bus from Manila. Still, you can spot foreigners walking around every now and then, but they really stand out among the Filipinos. A reason for their presence is often that they study or work at the Bolinao Marine Laboratory (BML), which belongs to the University of the Philippines (UP). It is one of the seven research institutions participating in the GAME project 2026. Every year, GAME brings together Master’s students from all over t