11°22′ N · 142°35′ E — above the Mariana Trench
DESCENT
Below you: 10,935 metres of open water, and almost none of it has ever been seen. The light gives up in the first two hundred. You won't.
— 200 metres. The last usable sunlight dissolves here. Everything below has been dark for four billion years.
Photosynthesis ends. From this point down, light is something animals make.
touch — it answers in light
400 m · twilight zone
01 / 05
Atolla wyvillei
the alarm jelly
When seized, the Atolla spins a silent pinwheel of blue light visible thirty metres away — a burglar alarm meant to summon something large enough to eat whatever is eating it.
— 700 m · a sperm whale can hunt here on a single held breath
1,200 m · midnight zone
02 / 05
Melanocetus johnsonii
the humpback anglerfish
Her lure glows with a colony of captive bacteria. When a male finds her in the dark, he bites on and dissolves — skin to skin, then vein to vein. Two animals, one bloodstream, no way home.
— 2,000 m · no instrument lowered this far has ever detected sunlight
3,000 m · midnight zone
03 / 05
Eurypharynx pelecanoides
the gulper eel
Mostly mouth, barely muscle. Its jaws unhinge around prey larger than itself, and its whip of a tail ends in a small pink light — bait, dangled a full body-length away from the teeth.
— 3,700 m · the ocean's average depth. most of the sea floor is still below you
5,000 m · abyssal zone
04 / 05
Grimpoteuthis
the dumbo octopus
The deepest-living octopus known, filmed nearly seven kilometres down. It rows through the abyss on ear-like fins and has given up its ink entirely — in a world without light, there is nothing left to blind.
— 6,500 m · the rated limit of the submersible Alvin. past this line, almost nothing built by humans has ever been
— 8,000 metres. The hadal zone, named for the god of the underworld. Eight hundred atmospheres press on every centimetre of you.
Snailfish live here — translucent, soft-boned, unbothered. Nothing about the deep asks permission to be alive.
— 10,000 m · everest, sunk in this trench, would still be two kilometres short of daylight
10,935 m · challenger deep
05 / 05
Bathyscaphe Trieste
23 January 1960 · Jacques Piccard & Don Walsh
Four hours and forty-seven minutes of falling. Twenty minutes on the bottom. Through the single porthole, Piccard swore he watched a flatfish glide calmly away — life, waiting at the deepest place on Earth, entirely unimpressed by the visit.
The deep sea is not empty. It is only unlit.