11 ms·
The Deep Sea
- unicornporn 7y agoVery nice! But, penguins at sub 500 meters? Honestly, wtf are you doing down there!?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chupa-chups 7y agoAs cool as it is, this link is probably being posted a little bit too often: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=neal.fun https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=neal.fun
- dang 7y agoOn HN, an article doesn't count as a dupe if it hasn't had significant attention yet. One user isn't allowed to repost the same article more than a small number of times (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but when the same article is posted by many different submitters, that's often an indication that it's interesting. Because of that, we invited Yuval_Halevi to repost it, since he was the first user to submit it in the first place. Invited reposts get put in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), which is why this one made it to the front page.
- wishinghand 7y agoThe site mentions the Trieste reaching Challenger Deep and how a window cracked on the way down. I can't imagine wanting to reach it so badly that they'd risk the implosion. I guess death at that depth has the benefit of being instant.
- kh_hk 7y agoIf you are interested, one of piccard books, Au Fond Des Mers en Bathyscaphe, explains everything from a personal perspective. It contains many engineering details that are deeply interesting
- blotter_paper 7y agoI can totally imagine wanting to reach it that badly -- what else could you do, turn back that close to the bottom? That said, they didn't actually know that a window had broken until they were already there[0]: > After almost five hours inside their tiny 6ft 4in cabin, the duo touched down on the sea floor at 36,000ft. [...] They spent 20 minutes there identifying the source of the explosive sound – a cracked acrylic window towards the back of the sub's entrance tunnel caused by the immense pressure of the water surrounding them. Due to their extreme conditions, they wouldn’t be able to fix it until they had made the long journey back to land through the silent abyss. They did still continue despite the sound and vibration, of course. [0]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/true-story-behind-deepest-dive-history/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/true-story-behind...
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> what else could you do, turn back that close to the bottom? Yes?
- ekianjo 7y agoYou can't come back that fast anyway.
- stared 7y agoIt reminds me of another scrolling experience, "If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system" (https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....).
- dugmartin 7y agoThere is a space object size visualization on that same site that is worth a look: https://neal.fun/size-of-space/ https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
- the_arun 7y agoI guess humans cannot stand suspense. I wanted to see what is in the end but gave up after 1.5K meters.
- aliceryhl 7y agoHuh, penguins can dive deep.
- wrnr 7y agoYea, that would be like me running to the night-shop to get beer and run back home, all the while holding my breath.
- alister 7y agoI wonder what prevents a fish that goes down to 100 meters from going down to 300 meters or 3000 meters. Does it feel an internal pressure that tells it to not dive further, or is it the amount of light or availability of food it seeks? Since fish wouldn't suffer from decompression sickness, I wonder if they could dive much deeper if they wanted to. Now that I think about it, I've scuba dived to 130 feet and it didn't feel any different to me than being at 10 feet. The only reason I didn't go deeper is because the depth gauge, divermaster, and training told me not to go deeper, and not because I was feeling the pressure.
- nexuist 7y agoExternal pressure. It might be easier for you to survive at 130ft because you have a sturdy rib-cage and skull that keeps your internals together. Fish do not get this luxury. It might be entirely possible for a fish to swim down to 3000 meters, but I think evolution probably played a role in killing off all the fish who decided to risk it and swim that deep. As a result, "modern" fish probably experience more anxiety or similar emotions as they go deeper.
- jimmyswimmy 7y agoI think this is wrong but I am not a biologist. Fish do not contain air, which is the compressible fluid which limits our ability to go to great depths unprotected. Water is very incompressible, and is most of what fish are. So I don't think depth is the issue. I would hazard a guess that it has to do with where food is.
- glofish 7y agoFish control their buoyancy via a swim bladder. Suddenly bringing up a deep water fish would make it explode. every 33ft up the volume of air doubles. Hence that rule of diving of never holding your breath and continuously letting the air out as you surface. What I find incredible that a seal could dive that deep, the volume of air at that depth would be a tiny fraction of the volume of air at the surface. It is as if its lungs were completely collapsed and empty.
- blotter_paper 7y agoOn mobile, my URL bar being displayed adds about 2 meters to the depth that any given creature can survive. I suggest that divers start putting URL bars at the top of their masks.
- mikebelanger 7y agoNice! Also liked the trivia 'snuck' into certain depths, like the deepest scuba dive at 332 meters.
- hoorayimhelping 7y agoI kept thinking "wow, that has to be the deepest diving air breathing animal here," and I kept being amazed at how deep some animals can dive.
- almost_usual 7y agoGreat site, it brought back nostalgia of reading deep sea books as a kid.
- luhn 7y agoI was Googling some creatures that caught my eye, including the Megamouth Shark at 4600 meters. The sources I read put it at 1000 meters at the deepest, but preferring much shallower waters. Am I overlooking something? Regardless, fun and interesting webpage!
- wyck 7y agoI see sources citing 4600m and also 1500m (as normal), but some footnotes and referances to The Deep Sea stats would be nice.
- rwmj 7y agoElephant Seals dive to 2400 meters and Cuviers Whales to 3000 meters? That's incredible for a mammal.
- skunkworker 7y agoI was amazed at that as well about the Elephant Seal. "One final note about life in the abyss: not all intruders from the lighted world are ROVs or submarines. A southern elephant seal tagged by Census project TOPP recently dove down 2,388 meters (~1.5 miles) from the surface. At that depth, water pressure is roughly equal to 240 times the air pressure at sea level. The human eardrum can rupture at 10 meters" http://www.coml.org/comlfiles/press/CoML_Beyond_Sunlight_11.17.2009_Public.pdf http://www.coml.org/comlfiles/press/CoML_Beyond_Sunlight_11....
- Exmoor 7y agoBeaked whales in general are fascinating. Only a fraction of a percent of people will likely every see one and only a fraction of those people will even know that they're seeing something more notable than any other whale. They're incredibly poorly understood to the point where there are very possibly species that are completely unknown to science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaked_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaked_whale
- pvaldes 7y ago> Only a fraction of a percent of people will likely every see one And I'm in that fraction, muahahahaha. ;-)
- gitgud 7y agoThat is amazing, I wonder how long that journey would be?
- Volker-E 7y agoThis is beautiful, thanks. Why not linking the creatures to their English Wikipedia pages to get curious folks more background? Wikimedia Foundation employee here in private comment. Just learnt the first time about the Leatherback Sea Turtle here.
- lifeformed 7y agoThis kind of content reminds me of Microsoft Encarta. It would be really neat if there were lots of visualizations and interactive educational sites that shared many links to Wikipedia, and have them all compiled somewhere on some Wikimedia page.
- Volker-E 7y agoSame here, after I wrote my comment, my next thought was what ways there could be enabled to have similar content on Wikimedia projects. The rules around Wikipedia projects (encyclopedic content, an article content narrated along an axis, as in meters here) and moderation are the hurdles from my POV. But then again, maybe it's simpler/better to have folks taking free content, putting it in a narration on their sites and linking back to Wikipedia as part of distributed Web.
- zozbot234 7y agoWikimedia projects are not limited to strictly encyclopedic stuff. A visualization about the deep sea could easily be allowed on Wikiversity, which is intended for miscellaneous educational material that doesn't easily find its way elsewhere. The biggest obstacle would be technical.
- matthewhartmans 7y ago+1 for this. Clicking the fish open in a new tab for there Wikipedia page.
- latahGatah 7y agoThis is really cool. I showed my son and they use it in his science class.
- uvesten 7y agoWow, that was a more visceral experience than what I anticipated. I felt more and more uncomfortable the deeper I went... Conclusion: I’d rather go to the Moon.
- TenJack 7y agoWow, didn't know polar bears could go that deep.
- itronitron 7y agoElephant seals can apparently dive much much deeper (2,388 m) which completely surprised me as well.
- buryat 7y agomy ipad overheated while browsing the page
- buryat 7y agowould be nice to have citations of the facts and links to the creatures. For example, I was interested if it's true that giant isopod could live for 5 years without food and couldn't find any credible information
- driverdan 7y agoThis looks like it might be cool but it's completely unusable for me in Firefox on a 2012 rMBP. It makes the browser nearly unresponsive, taking about 15 seconds to go back to the previous page.
- herewego 7y agoI’m on an iPhone X on Firefox and it’s a very smooth experience.
- wh1t3n01s3 7y agoMy iPhone X on brave got really hot tough
- pvaldes 7y agoI forgot the number of Jewel squids that I measured. I'm very fond of them, yep.
- mto 7y agoTime for another round of Subnautica
- FpUser 7y agoVery nicely done. Congratulations
- dmitshur 7y agoThe content and presentation is fantastic. The page is using up 15-20% CPU and GPU when it is the active tab even when not scrolling. That seems unexpected and unfortunate. (I noticed because by the time I got to 3400 meters, my laptop's fans became audible.)
- shaki-dora 7y agoNote that “the oldest species of <x>” doesn’t make any sense. Both that species as well as its closest evolutionary relative have a last common ancestor, meaning they are equally “old”. Do this a few times and you will notice all species have the same “age”, assuming life today all descendent from a common ancestor. Yes, some of them have may have changed more or less in appearance, but that correlates poorly with genetic changes.
- wtracy 7y ago"Oldest" in the sense that it has existed (as far as we can measure) in it's current form longer than any other species. You can't say that a species is as old as it's ancestral species, because you're talking about two different species.
- ekianjo 7y agoI was expecting a Cthulhu reference at the deepest point for good fun! Nicely done, but would be nice to also provide indicators of pressure and temperature on the side as you go down.
- remarkEon 7y ago>ELEPHANT SEAL DIVE >2400 METERS DEEP That one caught me off guard. I'm used to seeing stories (or "tales") of e.g. Sperm Whales accomplishing incredible dives like that. An elephant seal doesn't really seem to be tuned to that kind of performance dives.
- dddddaviddddd 7y agohttp://www.coml.org/comlfiles/press/CoML_Beyond_Sunlight_11.17.2009_Public.pdf http://www.coml.org/comlfiles/press/CoML_Beyond_Sunlight_11....
- remarkEon 7y agoFascinating Sunday read, thanks.
- nojvek 7y agoHoly moly. The human diving at 332 meters is insane. That’s 34 ata, or 34 times the atmospheric pressure, or 34x compression on your body. Did they use some sort of inverse pressurized suit that can hold this sort of pressure ? I’ve scuba dived to 50m and even that was a bit dizzy for the brain. People have known to hallucinate if they stay deep too long. 330+ meters is absolute nuts. Wow! Someone explain me the science of how this is possible.
- dahdum 7y agoYour body is primarily water so no pressure suit is necessary, but gas narcosis, high pressure neurological syndrome, and oxygen toxicity are all serious issues. You use different breathing mixtures like trimix or heliox to manage them. Ascending is just as dangerous since you now have highly compressed gas bubbles throughout your body. There are different models you can follow to manage decompression, but it’s far from settled science. Both individual variation and situational factors can affect it greatly.
- McDyver 7y agoVery broadly, when scuba diving you're breathing gas at the same pressure of the depth at which you are. So the deeper you go, the greater the pressure of the gas that is being dissolved into your tissues. You don't feel this pressure, only the pressure in the body's "hollow" spaces, like sinuses, Eustachian tubes. That's why you need to equalise on the way down. When you dive to 50m, the feeling of "being dizzy" happens when diving on air. This is due to Nitrogen narcosis. To minimise this, in technical diving, helium is added to the mix, to reduce the percentage of nitrogen and minimise the narcosis. Going down to 332m, as you correctly say subjects you to a pressure of 34 Bar. To dive this deep you need to be breathing 4% Oxygen, maximum (compared to 21% that is in air we breathe at the surface). At this level, making the mix needs to be extremely precise and you need to be sure your instruments are properly calibrated, as a 5% mix can potentially kill you at that depth.
- billfruit 7y agoAmazing to know elephant seal and cuviers beaked whale dived so deep. One additional info that could be included is that of submarines and their depth rating.
- xivzgrev 7y agoWow I felt increasing anxiety / claustrophobia as I scrolled deeper and deeper. I can’t imagine what it was like for those two in that tiny sub. A mix of that and elation/excitement at pushing the frontier of man forward
- bmn__ 7y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia https://old.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia
- retendo 7y agoIf you enjoyed this and also like playing games, treat yourself with Subnautica. It‘s very good at giving you the feeling of how I would think it would feel to have to survive on an ocean covered planet, including diving into the depths. https://www.unknownworlds.com/subnautica https://www.unknownworlds.com/subnautica
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThis really goes to show you how far species we normally think of as living mostly near the surface will go in search of a meal.
- Andromeda88 7y agoThroughoutly enjoyed it. Thanks for the good work.
- C14L 7y ago> 6000 m: "More people have been to the Moon than the Hadal Zone." I wish some bored billionaires would take up the challenge and pump their billions into deep sea research. Like some others do for space exploration. > "So little is known about life in these deep environments. Almost every expedition uncovers something new."
- georgewsinger 7y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/ray-dalio-ocean-exploration-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/ray-dalio-ocean-exploration-...
- dnhz 7y agoThat's a lot of water that we're acidifying
- tectonic 7y agoBeautiful! A really important article about how we’re about to start mining these regions on an unprecedented scale: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-feet-under-the-sea/603040/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-f...
- sabujp 7y agoi was not expecting to see an elephant seal at 2392 meters!
- shabirgilkar 7y agoIs there any documentary which takes us this deep?