Picture this. You cut Mount Everest off right at sea level. You carry it out over the Pacific Ocean and set it down at the very bottom of the Challenger Deep. Now look up. The top of that mountain is still under more than a mile of water. Whoa.
The Challenger Deep is the deepest place in the whole ocean. It is almost 36,000 feet deep. Most of the ocean is way shallower than that. The average depth is about 12,000 feet. That makes the Challenger Deep nearly three times deeper than the ocean's average.
It sits inside the Mariana Trench, and that trench is huge too. It is a crescent-shaped scar in Earth's crust. It stretches more than 1,500 miles long.
Here's the really wild part. Hardly anybody has ever been down there. The first two people to reach the Challenger Deep were Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, way back in 1960. As of 2022, fewer than 30 people had ever made the trip. That is a super short list for a whole planet full of people!
So here's one for you: if Mount Everest were sitting at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, about how much water would be over its top?
