The oceans occupy 70% of the entire planet, and a person who boasts of his invented title of "king of beasts" has managed to find out only 5% of his secrets. We can say that we just went into the water ankle-deep, but what awaits us there, at great depths? The Mariana Trench has been attracting scientists from all over the world for a very long time. Several dives into these gloomy, as if otherworldly depths have already given a person so many mysteries that they will have to be solved for centuries.
Dive "Trieste"
One of the first human attempts to solve the mystery of the Mariana Trench was made in 1960. The Trieste bathyscaphe created in NASA laboratories sank to a depth of 10,915 meters. Scientists aboard the research vessel Glomar Challenger began to receive strange audio information: it seemed that someone was sawing metal. The camera recorded the unusual shadows that had accumulated around the bathyscaphe. As many as eight hours he climbed to the surface of the "Trieste", and during the inspection of the skin three of the four chambers were broken, and the lifting cables were cut in half. It is still unclear who could have done this.
Finds in the depths of hell
Scientists today are unable to identify the creatures found at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench. The automatic probe Nereus carried from the dive a mass of photographs and videos, which captured strange, sometimes really frightening creatures. One and a half meter worms without a mouth, octopuses that look like mutated tentacles from Japanese cartoons, giant starfish - it's better not to swim in these waters at all.
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Toxic life
And here is, perhaps, the most amazing fact about the monsters of the Mariana Trench. In June last year, British researchers published an interesting document according to which the bodies of deep-sea crustaceans from the bottom are literally saturated with toxins through and through. The level of pollution was much higher than that shown by creatures living in the coastal waters of the ocean, where waste is usually thrown from factories. Moreover, some crustaceans even emitted radioactive radiation. But where does the radiation come from where a person can barely reach with his fingertips?
Collision with the abyss
A German research bathyscaphe with three scientists on board had already sunk 7 kilometers when unusual, unseen creatures appeared around it. Subsequently, oceanographers scientists described them as "dragons". They grabbed onto the hull of the Highfish and only a strong discharge of energy, launched by the frightened people in a special arc (it encircled the entire bathyscaphe), forced them to get away.
Megalodon's house
Previously, scientists assumed that the giant prehistoric shark megalodon disappeared from the oceans several million years ago. But in 1997, a group of Japanese scientists working to study the secrets of the Mariana Trench managed to raise a frightening video to the surface. A huge, a couple of tens of meters long shark appeared at the feeder, to which deep-sea goblin sharks were lured. So this is where the last megalodons are left!