More humans have stood on the Moon than reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where crushing pressure equals 50 jumbo jets on a chest. Yet when cameras finally descended nearly 36,000 feet, they didn’t just find pale snailfish and armored isopods thriving in permanent darkness.
The ocean covers roughly 70 percent of the planet, yet about 80 percent of it has never been directly observed. More of the surface of Mars has been mapped than the floor beneath the waves. The deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 36,000 feet below the surface. In all of human history, three people have reached its bottom: two in 1960 and one in 2012.For comparison, more tha…