Sixth Grade
Worksheets
The Challenger Deep
Do you know what the highest point on Earth is? It's Mount Everest in Nepal. It stands at an amazing twenty-nine thousand, twenty-nine feet above sea level! It's so high that climbers need to bring their own oxygen for the climb! Now imagine Mount Everest turned upside down under the ocean. Can you imagine how deep that would be? There's a place under the ocean that's deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
The place has been named the Challenger Deep. It's located in a trench in the Pacific Ocean, not far from Japan and the Philippines. Trenches are the opposite of mountains, and yes, there are mountains under the ocean. As a matter of fact, some islands are the tops of underwater mountains. At the center of the Pacific Ocean is a mountain range under the water. At the furthest edges of these mountains are trenches. The Challenger Deep is located in the Mariana Trench.
The Challenger Deep is thirty-five thousand, seven hundred ninety-seven feet deep. That far down in the ocean there is a lot of water pressing down. All that water, of course, is really heavy. In fact, the pressure at that depth is almost one thousand, one hundred times greater than the air pressure on the surface. In other words, your body would crush in an instant at that depth.
