The pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is so strong, is there still mud on the bottom of it? What form?

It is better to use an analogy. Everyone knows that Mount Everest is the highest peak on earth. If the position of the highest peak moves from the Himalayas to the deepest seabed, the top of the mountain cannot be exposed to the sea.

The elevation of Mount Everest is 8848.86 meters, and the deepest seabed is likely to be 11 kilometers. At 8:12 on November 10 last year, China's manned submersible "Striver" successfully sat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The measured sitting depth is also 10,909 meters.

Scientists estimate that the formation time of this trench is likely to have been more than 60 million years away from now. From a height, it is an arc, with an average width of 70 kilometers, and the length of the entire trench is 2,550 kilometers. Don't think too much, the seabed of 10,000 meters must be dim and dull. Few animals can survive on the seabed with such high water pressure, low water temperature, and extremely low oxygen content. Therefore, the deepest part of sea shopping should not be regarded by experts. One of the worst environments. The reason why scientists are so interested in this area is not only the depth, but also the reasons for its formation and the constituent materials. Because this trench happens to be a plate subduction zone, there will be more submarine geological movements on weekdays.

Is there still mud in the Mariana Trench, and how is it different from other mud?

In fact, it is not surprising that some people think that "the Mariala Trench is so deep that the high pressure will cause the mud to be crushed."

However, no matter how deep the trench is, its position is always above the crust. It is impossible to make any difference because the depth is very large. The crust is the outermost solid layer of the earth, but the thickness of the crust in the seabed area of ​​the ocean will be thinner. While the ocean floor may be missing the upper layers of the crust, the granite layers, the lower basalt layers are completely continuous circles in the oceans and continents.

Although the Mariana Trench is very deep, there is also soil deep in the trench, but the proportion of soil constituents may be different from the soil on land, and it will not change in shape due to depth and high pressure. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions often occur here, and the geological activity is very strong. Therefore, although more and more people have climbed Mount Everest, very few people have reached the depths of the Mariana Trench, and most of them are Carry out special scientific investigations, after all, the huge water pressure on the seabed is equivalent to 1100 atmospheres.

Generally speaking, as long as the water depth exceeds 2000 meters, there will be a large amount of loose deep-sea sediments, which may be the remains of some marine life, or volcanic ash, aeolian dust and authigenic deposits. Deep-sea sediments can be mainly divided into two types: biogenic sediments and non-biogenic sediments. The former is actually biological ooze, and this type of real organic species has more than 30% of biological remains, while volcanic sediments, landslides and brown sediments. Clay These are non-biogenic sediments.

Although nearly 45.6% of the world's ocean bottoms have calcareous ooze, and nearly 10.9% of the ocean area has siliceous ooze, if the water depth is greater than 3,000 meters, it is basically impossible to have much calcareous ooze. The distribution range of siliceous ooze is also concentrated in the average water depth of 3900 meters. So, the sediments deep in the Mariana Trench are more of other types of material.

China's 10,000-meter deep dive, from unmanned submersibles to soft robots!

In the world's deepest seabed, in addition to the soft and delicate soil and a lot of deep-sea sediments, there are very rare deep-sea wildlife. For example, on May 27, 2019, the Chinese ocean-going comprehensive scientific research ship "Science" discovered the sea hare through a remote-controlled unmanned submersible. Since sea hares usually live in tropical shallow sea areas, it is difficult to find these pink cuties in the deep sea. The two pairs of protruding tentacles do look like rabbit ears.

At the same time, at the seamount on the south side of the Mariana Trench, the Chinese expedition team also discovered a lot of coral forests, maybe 10 in number. These colorful coral forests look like a seabed. In gardens, it is undoubtedly particularly rare to see thriving growth such as columnar polyps and corals in such areas.

Not long ago, Chinese soft robots also broke through the 10,000-meter-level deep dive, creating the world's first time. The design was inspired by a marine animal called lionfish. Their soft bodies can dive at a depth of seven or eight thousand meters. The world travels freely. It just so happened that in 2017, the "Deep Sea Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences" captured a lionfish sample, so the researchers obtained the structure and skeletal characteristics of the lionfish through CT scans, and the results were indeed quite different from ordinary fish. . Of course, it was only after overcoming a series of technical difficulties that this lionfish-like software robot could move like a fish in a 10,000-meter trench, which is not a simple matter.