At a maximum reported depth of 8,376 metres, the huge Puerto Rico Trench includes one of the deepest points of the Atlantic Ocean.
The trench is the boundary of two plates - the Caribbean plate and the North American plate - and has produced earthquakes of a magnitude greater than 8.0. Scientists believe it is possible that the trench can do so again, which would result in a tsunami.
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Measuring 1,090 miles in length, its deepest point is often called the Milwaukee Deep which is roughly 8,380 meters deep, just shy of the height of the world's second highest peak - the K2.
It was only in 2018 that an explorer went to the deepest point of the trench: Victor Vescovo dived on 19 December and made history. He became the first person to reach the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and made the second-deepest recorded solo dive in history. The dive was part of the Five Deeps Expedition, which saw him dive to the deepest points in every ocean.
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Where is the Puerto Rico Trench?
The Puerto Rico Trench runs parallel with the northern coasts of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and it is the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is about 120 km north of Puerto Rico and is north of the Virgin Islands and was first discovered by the HMS Challenger Expedition in 1875. It is a tectonic plate boundary - where the North American plate descends under the Caribbean plate.
How big is the Puerto Rico Trench?
The trench stretches over 1,000 miles long, and around 8,380 metres deep, which is almost as deep as the K2 is high and it took explorers about two and a half hours to go down into it in a submersible in 2018. It is just shy of the deepest place in the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, which measures 10,994 metres down.
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Gravity in the Puerto Rico Trench
The Puerto Rico Trench is home to what people believe is the world's biggest negative gravity anomaly. This was first discovered in 1671 when a French astronomer noticed that his pendulum clock lost time every day they were in the area of the trench.
NASA believes that the reason for the strange gravitational pull is due to a huge dense mass beneath the trench, which also affects the accuracy of navigational instruments. If you drop an object near the Puerto Rico Trench it will fall slightly faster than elsewhere on the planet.
Wildlife in the Puerto Rican Trench
Because of its depth, the Puerto Rico Trench has been hard to study and as a result, little is known about the species that live there. The pressure is immense, and many animals cannot survive down there, while those that do, struggle to live higher up. Its deepest section is in the hadalpelagic (or hadal) zone where invertebrates dominate.
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During diving explorations to the Puerto Rico Trench, scientists spotted swarms of tiny creatures called amphipods alongside what they thought was a sea cucumber. Scooping up the amphipods they later discovered that they were Scopelocheirus schellenbergi, a species of amphipod that have only been discovered in deep trenches in the Pacific Ocean.
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They also identified a small crustacean which was thought to be a member of the Munnopsidae family of isopods alongside a species of Cusk eel, Abyssobrotula galatheae, which is thought to be the deepest living fish ever captured. For most fish the intense pressure of the area would destabilise the proteins in their bodies, but cusk eels (and other deep-sea fish) counteract this by accumulating a protective chemical called Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) in their tissues.
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