How Deep The Mariana Trench Is Compared To Mount Everest
Mount Everest is the tallest thing on planet Earth. The Mariana Trench is the deepest. Stand them back to back and the proud mountain, rather humiliatingly, loses, and not by some polite little margin, either. Here is exactly how badly the ocean out-does the sky.
The Numbers
Let's line them up. The deepest point in the Mariana Trench, a slot in the western Pacific called the Challenger Deep, bottoms out at roughly 36,000 feet below sea level, about 6.8 miles straight down. Mount Everest, for all its glory, tops out at 29,032 feet above sea level, about 5.5 miles up. That makes the trench roughly 7,000 feet, or about 1.3 miles, deeper than the mountain is tall. The ocean wins by a landslide, or perhaps more accurately, by a mudslide.
Drop Everest In and It Just Vanishes
Here is the mental image everyone loves. Pick up Mount Everest, the single tallest object any human has ever climbed, and drop it straight into the Challenger Deep. It would sink without a trace, and its summit, the literal roof of the world, would still sit more than a mile beneath the waves. You could float a boat directly over the top of a completely submerged Everest and have absolutely no idea it was down there, hiding in the cold and the dark.
The Crushing Part
And you really would not want to be down there with it. The water pressure at the bottom of the Challenger Deep is about eight tons per square inch, more than a thousand times what you feel at sea level. That is roughly the equivalent of balancing 50 jumbo jets on top of a single person. The water hovers just a few degrees above freezing, there is not a single photon of sunlight, and anything unprotected would be flattened in a heartbeat. It is, by a very comfortable margin, the single most hostile address on the planet.
Everest Is Basically a Tourist Trap
Now for the genuinely humbling twist. For all its deadly reputation, Mount Everest is, relatively speaking, positively crowded. More than 6,000 people have reached its summit, occasionally forming actual traffic jams up in the so-called death zone. The bottom of the Mariana Trench? A grand total of a handful of humans have ever been there. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh made the first descent in 1960 aboard the submersible Trieste, and it was another 52 years before filmmaker James Cameron made the first solo dive in 2012. The highest place on Earth is a bucket-list destination; the deepest is still very nearly a total mystery.
Putting It in Perspective
So just how deep is deep? To climb out of the Challenger Deep, you would have to scale the entire height of Everest and then keep right on going, another 7,000 feet up through thin air, before your head finally broke the surface. For another gut-check, the wreck of the Titanic rests about 12,500 feet down in the North Atlantic, which sounds impossibly deep until you realize it is barely a third of the way to the trench floor. The Mariana Trench does not merely beat Mount Everest. It swallows the tallest mountain on Earth whole, and then calmly asks whether there is anything else on the menu.
