New Delhi: The Mariana Trench is an oceanic trench in the western side of the Pacific Ocean. The trench, whose shape is like crescent, is located 200 kilometres east of the Mariana Islands near Guam and has two lowest points on the planet. The trench’s surrounding environment has many unique environments, including active mud volcanoes and marine life which live with pressures 1,000 times than what it is at the sea level.
Why is it called Mariana Trench?
The Mariana Trench has been named after the Mariana Islands which is located nearby. The islands have been named Las Marianas after Spanish Queen Mariana of Austria. The islands belong to the island arc that is formed on an over-riding plate, called the Mariana plate.
How was the Mariana Trench formed?
The length of the Mariana Trench is 1,580 miles and it is more than five times the Grand Canyon’s length and its width is only 43 miles. It was created by subduction zone’s process where oceanic crust’s two massive slabs called tectonic plates collide with each other. In the subduction zone, an oceanic crust is pulled under another into the Earth’s mantle. At the place of the intersection of two pieces of crust, a deep trench is formed above the bend in the sinking crust.
The two deepest points on earth
As has been mentioned, the Mariana Trench has two deepest points on Earth. In its southern end lies the Challenger Deep, which is the deepest point in the ocean. According to a reach by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2010, Challenger Deep was 36,070 feet deep. The Mariana Trench also has the second-deepest place on Earth. Its name is Sirena Deep and it is 35,462 feet deep. To put into perspective, the height of Mount Everest stands is 29,026 feet above sea level, which means the Mariana Trench’s deepest part is 7,044 feet deeper than Everest is tall.
Life at Mariana Trench
Some creatures are found to be living at the Mariana Trench like flatfish and shrimp. Most common organisms which are found there are amphipods, small sea cucumbers, xenophyophores, and also, Mariana snailfish, a predator also lives there. The creatures living there have to survive in complete darkness and extreme pressure.
Plastic pollution at Mariana Trench
Even a place like Mariana Trench is not free from plastic pollution. In 2017, a study was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, a research team revealed that chemicals that were banned in the 1970s are still present the ocean’s deepest parts. According to a paper published in Geochemical Perspectives in 2018, microplastics were common in Mariana Trench’s lowest waters, raising an alarm.
Infact, another study showed that Mariana Trench has higher pollution levels in certain regions than some of China’s most polluted rivers. The Trench possibly got the chemical pollutants from the breakdown of plastic in the water column. The pollution is transferred from one creature to another through the food chain of the ocean, and it eventually results in chemical concentrations which are far more than the pollution at the surface level.
The Mariana Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean, is the deepest part of the Earth’s oceans, featuring the Challenger Deep and Sirena Deep. Formed by subduction zones where tectonic plates collide, it boasts unique ecosystems adapted to extreme pressure and darkness, housing creatures like snailfish and amphipods. knowledge Knowledge News, Photos and Videos on General Knowledge
