Expedition 01 / Kermadec Trench / South Pacific
10,047 m to the floor of the Kermadec Trench, with the lights on.
In March a two-person submersible leaves the surface north of New Zealand and keeps sinking for four hours. We’re taking a camera to the bottom, and giving away everything it sees.
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Sunlight zone 0–200 m
The sea takes red first.
Red light is gone ten metres down. Orange goes next, then yellow, then green. By two hundred metres the water has swallowed ninety-nine percent of the sunlight, and what’s left is blue.
Watch the light meter on the gauge.
Twilight zone 200–1,000 m
The biggest migration on Earth happens every night.
At dusk, billions of lanternfish, shrimp and squid swim up hundreds of metres to feed, then sink back before sunrise. Their bellies glow to match the light from above, so nothing underneath can see their silhouettes.
740 m Apolemia
One animal, or a thousand.
That spiral of lights is a siphonophore: hundreds of cloned bodies sharing one stem, each with a single job. Swim, eat, sting, breed. Some colonies grow longer than a blue whale.
1,000 m
Lights out.
No sunlight reaches past a thousand metres. From here to the floor, the only light is the light animals make, and the lamp we brought.
The lamp follows your cursor.Tap anywhere to aim the lamp.
Midnight zone 1,000–4,000 m
Three in four animals down here make their own light.
They use it to hunt, to hide, to find each other and to call for help. Most of it is blue, the colour that carries furthest through seawater.
1,650 m Atolla wyvillei
The alarm jelly.
Grab an Atolla and it spins a wheel of blue light, a burglar alarm that calls in something bigger to eat whatever grabbed it. In our lamp it turns crimson. Red light never reaches this deep, so down here red is as good as black.
Put the lamp on it.
2,900 m Anglerfish
The lure is borrowed.
The light on an anglerfish’s lure is made by bacteria she keeps in a pouch at its tip. Everything behind it is teeth. Look too closely and the light goes out.
Abyssal zone 4,000–6,000 m
An hour of snow.
For the next two thousand metres there is little to see but marine snow: flakes of the dead and the discarded, falling for weeks from the surface. Down here it is most of the menu.
4,600 m Malacosteus niger
A searchlight nobody else can see.
The stoplight loosejaw shines a red beam that almost nothing else down here can detect. It hunts in a colour its prey doesn’t know exists.
The submersible DSV Patience
Two people in a titanium ball.
Everything that matters fits inside a sphere 1.5 metres across, with walls 90 millimetres thick. Everything outside it is foam, batteries, thrusters, lights and cameras, and all of it is replaceable.
- Crew
- Two: pilot and camera
- Hull
- Titanium sphere, 1.5 m inside
- Rated depth
- 11,000 m
- Descent
- 0.7 m/s, about four hours
- Bottom time
- Four hours
- Light
- 24 LED floods, one steerable lamp
- Cameras
- Three 8K, one macro
- Life support
- 96 hours
Two inside, twenty‑nine topside.
The pilot and the camera operator share the sphere for eleven hours, knees touching. Above them: a support ship, twenty-nine crew and an acoustic modem that delivers a short text every few minutes.
Hadal zone 6,000–10,047 m, named for Hades
A tonne on every fingernail.
Pressure rises by one atmosphere every ten metres. At the bottom it is a little over a thousand: about a tonne pressing on every square centimetre of the sphere.
8,300 m Hirondellea, Alicella
Fish give out about here.
No fish has been filmed much deeper. Below this line the floor belongs to amphipods, pale scavenging crustaceans. In this trench some grow as long as your forearm.
10,047 m The floor
Contact.
Four hours down, at 1,011 bar and 2.4 °C. Four more on the bottom with every light on. Every frame we shoot goes into the public domain, free for anyone, for good.
Fund the next dive
This dive is paid for. The next one isn’t.
A dive costs about three hundred thousand dollars, which works out at thirty dollars a metre. Pick yours.
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1 m
One metre
Your name in the dive log at the depth you choose.
$30
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1 min
One minute on the floor
A minute of footage from 10,047 metres, with your name in the credits.
$900
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Monthly
The ballast fund
Pays for the steel plates we drop to come back up. Stop whenever you like.
$12/month