Log Post: Life Under Pressure – 100 Elephants on Your Head

One hundred adult elephants standing on your head. That is about the weight you would feel at the bottom of the Mariana Trench from nearly 11,000 m (7 miles) of water above! Water’s weight creates pressure (more properly, hydrostatic pressure), one of the most important factors affecting deep-sea life. Pressure increases by 1 atmosphere (atm) … Continued

Log Post: Who’s Who and So Much More

I am possibly the luckiest high school marine biology teacher on the planet.  Here I am headed to the Sirena Deep with some of the most brilliant deep-sea scholars in the world. If you have not read the Team Bios, do it soon.  This place reads like a Who’s Who in deep sea exploration.  Dr. … Continued

Log Post: A rock hound with a bunch of biologists

Trenches fascinate me for a lot of reasons.  They are the one place on Earth where geology creates the most spectacular events. Trenches form where boundaries of the huge tectonic plates on the surface of the Earth (its crust and upper mantle) collide and one plate moves down beneath another. The largest earthquakes occur in … Continued

Log Post: The Final Deep

Last night we steamed over the Mariana Trench, registering a maximum depth of 9726 meters (over 6 miles deep), by far our deepest sounding.