You Could Sink Everest Into the Sea and It Would Vanish

The Mariana Trench, in the Pacific, drops to about 10,900 metres at a spot called Challenger Deep. Everest stands 8,849. If you could tear the whole mountain loose and set it down on that seabed, its summit — the same one crowned with flags and expedition photos — would lie buried under more than two kilometres of ocean.

Down there, not a single ray of sunlight arrives. The pressure is around a tonne per square centimetre: like balancing a small car on your thumbnail. And yet there is life: snailfish, amphipods, translucent creatures that will never know what the sun is.

We tend to look up when we search for extremes. But this planet's record isn't in the sky: it's in a dark crack in the Pacific where the most famous mountain in the world would fit whole, with room to spare.