when you find boiling hot springs at that depth you kinda loss track
That’s kind of a cool idea! The next-deepest trench is roughly 400 meters shallower, while the earth’s diameter vaies by a distance of roughly 10 miles. So it’s plausible, certainly. I don’t know how to look up the distance between an arbitrary spot on the planet and its antipode, though.
In general, places closer to the equator are further from the centre of the Earth. The difference in Earth’s diameter between the Equator and the Poles is 26 miles, so a ship on the surface at the North Pole or even a person standing at the South Pole (altitude 2800 metres) is closer to the centre of the Earth than the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
The closest point to the centre is probably Litke Deep, in the Arctic Ocean northeast of Svalbard- at 83 degrees North, and 5,450 metres deep.
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A glance at Wikipedia says the Trieste was as deep or deeper, so why are the boys arguing now? First trumps other things, and that’s the Trieste.
I miss the days when submarines were bathyscaphes and going deep was a major event, not a chance to argue over a few measly metres. It was a time when National Geographic covered such things. I have to dig out that box of old Geographics and reread tge article about the Trieste searching for the USS Thresher, and the article about submarine escape (which may have been in the same issue or even part if the main article).
A lot has been uncovered in recent decades and certainly they have better equipment and cameras. I’ve viewed some of those underwater cams, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has some, and everything is so clear compared to old photos. But the adventure doesn’t seem the same as fifty or more years ago when there was more mystery about what was in the ocean.
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