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THE OCEAN'S DEEP SPOT

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 19, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 12.

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THE OCEAN'S DEEP SPOT.

The deepest spot in the ocean has been found. More than five miles of wire ran out without the bottom being reached. Then the wire broke. This spot was recently discovered by the surveying ship Penguin, near the Friendly Islands, in the South Pacific. Commander Balfour, of that ship, reports that this remarkable discovery was made in latitude 23° 40′ south, longitude 175° 10′ west. When he first discovered this extraordinary hole, which, so far as we know now, is bottomless, Captain Balfour attempted to take the depth, and the sounding line was run out.
After 4,300 fathoms had run out over the side of the ship, the wire broke, and a rising sea and wind prevented any further attempt of the kind being made. Upon the second attempt he managed to pass 4,900 fathoms, or 29,400 feet of the wire, over the ship's side before the wire broke and put an end to the experiment.
The deepest spot in the ocean previously known was close to the coast of Japan, where a sounding had been made of 4,655 fathoms. This is 245 fathoms, or more than 1,400 feet, shallower than the deep hole which has now been discovered.
How much deeper it goes than 4,900 fathoms no man can know. It is a piece of water more than five miles deep. What the pressure must be at the bottom no scientist has yet been bold enough to conjecture.
There is no glass instrument that could resist this pressure. It would be impossible with the most improved scientific appliances to take the temperature of this enormous depth.
No living thing that is known to science could exist at a depth so great as this, where the pressure must be equal to many hundred or thousand foot tons, sufficient to squeeze the life out of any fish. Even brass and iron instruments lowered to this enormous depth would be twisted and distorted.
The most painstaking work in lowering a piano wire to sound a depth such as this will not suffice to keep it from breaking. This is because of the friction of the water against the wire.
In spite of every appliance of balance and spring in the machinery on deck, designed to counteract the motion of the vessel, the increase and decrease of pressure caused by rising and falling on a wave will snap the strongest wire when it has been lowered to so great a distance.
All of the water at the bottom must support the weight of the water on top of it. The consequence is that the water in the lowest depths is compressed under enormous pressure.
The theory has been advanced that some strange, unknown creatures may live in this highly compressed water. There may be fish of a kind so peculiar that they can not exist closer to the surface, where the water is thinner and the pressure less.
Through countless ages of living in the darkest, deepest depths of ocean, these fish may have evolved forms and natures unknown to men of science, because hitherto such vast depths have been unexplored. What the bottom of such a place may be like is only a matter of conjecture.
It may support a fauna and flora of its own. It may have its own plant and animal life, which some daring scientist will bring to light, to astonish and amaze the scientific world.
Here, where there can be no light, the fish, if fish there be, must be eyeless, like that queer breed of fish which Darwin cited existing in the rivers of the Mammoth Cave, but still, under the scalpel of the scientist, disclosing what is known in biology as a “rudimentary eye.” The fishes of these deepest depths may have rudimentary eyes and rudimentary lungs.
They may have been pressed hard and flat like a pancake by the enormous weight of the water above them, and may indeed move about by a method as strange and curious as was that of the kangaroo when first brought to the attention of Europe. These are questions for the scientific world to solve. They have been brought to the front by the discovery by the Penguin of a spot in the ocean deeper than any that has been known hitherto.
—N. Y. Monthly World.