For that person in your life who already has everything and Katy Perry fans alike, viewing the world’s most remote plastic bag is an experience you can’t put a price tag on.

Īnd for $750,000, you can hitch a ride on the DSV Limiting Factor - just you and Victor, locked in a submarine for hours - and visit the Mariana Trench yourself. This $37 million submarine in itself is impressive, being the only one to reach the deepest point in all five oceans, though you have probably already guessed that at that price, it’s owned by an adrenaline junkie private equity bro. Since then, the DSV Limiting Factor has made several successful dives, most recently in 2021.

Cameron, but some aspects of this mission were hilariously and painfully capitalistic - like the submarine wearing a functioning Rolex the entire damn time (#sponcon), and our most reliable account of descent and ascent times and depths are from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s tweets aboard his yacht. Sometimes I ask myself why deep sea explorers aren’t considered as cool as astronauts - even though the latter certainly need more all-around fitness, I honestly don’t know if I’d be more scared to go to space or the Mariana Trench.Īnd just like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are ruining going to space, we had James Cameron to ruin going to the depths of the ocean in his Deepsea Challenger, the second voyage to reach the Challenger Deep. The giant squid, a great example of aforementioned gigantism at anywhere from 30ish to 40ish feet long and the animal most subject to Hollywood’s creative license. The giant isopod, arguably the creepiest just because it looks like a giant bug, but it’s actually a crustacean. The evolutionary adaptations are actually kind of incredible, and luckily wikipedia has a whole page on deep sea fish if you’re curious about their shared characteristics and scientists’ best guesses on why and how they survive.Īnd of course, there are the scary creatures that are more misunderstood than anything: Literally, in the case of its animals, who are so well-adapted to their environments that it’s likely they’ve been evolving down there for a long, long time. I think what gets me the most about the abyssal and hadal zones is that they are ancient. There aren’t really fish down this far because of the extreme pressure and temperatures, though they increase in number and variety once you ascend to the abyssal zone - just as terrifying and dark, only not in a trench. 3 existing in the hadal zone, mostly a lot of the -pods ( isopods, amphipods, gastropods, etc.) and species of sea cucumbers.

Our wives under the sea cover