They are also important for fisheries management and conservation, because it is around the underwater mountains that wildlife tends to congregate. Each seamount is a biodiversity hotspot. In addition, the rugged seafloor influences the behaviour of ocean currents and the vertical mixing of water. This is information required to improve the models that forecast future climate change - because it is the oceans that play a pivotal role in moving heat around the planet.
And if you want to understand precisely how sea-levels will rise in different parts of the world, good ocean-floor maps are a must. Team-member and co-author on the new paper, Prof Alan Jamieson, is still aboard. He said the research ship was making discoveries every time it sent instrumentation into the deep. Just last month, we recorded a jellyfish 1,m deeper than 9,m, which was the previous record by us.
So we've now got jellyfish down to 10,m. A squid at that depth! How did we not know this? And during the Five Deeps Expedition, we added 2,m on the depth range for an octopus. In recent years, deep-ocean dredges and unmanned subs have glimpsed exotic organisms such as shrimp-like amphipods, and strange, translucent animals called holothurians.
But scientists say there are many new species awaiting discovery and many unanswered questions about how animals can survive in these extreme conditions.
Scientists are particularly interested in microorganisms living in the trenches, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in biomedicine and biotechnology. Additionally, studying rocks from ocean trenches could lead to a better understanding of the earthquakes that create the powerful and devastating tsunamis seen around the Pacific Rim, geologists say.
Marine Protected Areas. Find us on Facebook. Follow deepchallenge Join the Conversation. National Geographic. Thank you! The motion of these plates produces a convergent plate boundary because the greater speed of the Pacific Plate is causing it to collide into the Philippine Plate. This collision produces a subduction zone at the Mariana Trench as the Pacific Plate descends into the mantle and under the Philippine Plate.
This collision occurs at variable speeds along the curving boundary of the plates, but the average relative motion is in the range of tens of millimeters per year. Recurrent earthquakes occur along this plate boundary because the Pacific Plate's descent into the mantle is not smooth and uniform.
Instead, the plates are usually stuck with pressure accumulating, but with sudden slips as the plates move a few millimeters to a few meters at a time.
When the plates slip, vibrations are produced, and those vibrations travel through Earth's crust as earthquake waves. As the Pacific Plate descends into the mantle, it is heated by friction and the geothermal gradient. At a depth of approximately miles, the rocks have been heated to a point where some minerals begin to melt.
This melting produces magma that rises towards the surface because of its lower density. As the magma reaches the surface, volcanic eruptions are produced. These eruptions have formed the Mariana Island archipelago. Find Other Topics on Geology. Maps Volcanoes World Maps. With a maximum depth of 9 km, the Japan trench stretches from the Kuril Islands to the Bonin Islands and is also the extension of the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench and the Izu-Ogasawara Trench to the north and south respectively.
The trench was formed due to the subduction of the oceanic Pacific plate beneath the continental Okhotsk Plate. Lies at a depth of 8. Efforts for a complete mapping of this trench have been undergoing on for a quite long time now. This South Sandwich Trench is also associated with an active volcanic arc. The Atacama Trench has a maximum depth of 8. The deepest point of the trench is known as Richards Deep.
The trench measures around 5, km in length and 64 km in mean width while it covers an area of about , square kilometres. The Atacama Trench was formed as a result of a convergent boundary, between the subducting Nazca and the South American Plates.
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