The deepest point on the Earth's surface is in the Pacific Ocean located in the Marianas trench. This point is called the "Challenger Deep" and is 35,818 feet deep.
Deep Under The Ocean
As most people know, the ocean floor isn't just flat like your kitchen floor. Like land surfaces, it has valleys, mountains made from volcanoes, and plateaus created by coral reefs. But it's the ocean depths that go unplumbed, especially when they get as deep as it goes off the Marianas Islands.
That's where you'll find Challenger Deep, a cleft in the ocean floor named for the British survey ship that first came across the oddity in 1951. Given that the sciences of oceanography, geophysics and a few other specialties were not all that refined, it was an amazing conclusion for them to bring back the fact that they had found an ocean valley that was over 35,000 feet deep. Of course, there were skeptics.
They were dealt with in 1960, when the U.S. Navy sent down a submersible mini submarine, specially designed for deepwater exploration. It touched bottom at 35,813 feet. At that point there was seven miles of water over their heads, exerting a hydrostatic pressure of 16,000 pounds per square inch. If you stacked Mount McKinley on top of Mount Whitney, you'd still have another half mile of water before you broke the surface.
How was Challenger Deep created? The Earth's crust consists of floating "plates", and not one solid "scab" over the molten core of the planet. The crust under the ocean is actually thicker than crust under land masses. As these plates float on top of the magma, they move and slam into each other. Violent meeting of crusts means something has to give way. On land, the crust tends to buckle upwards and break, where the tougher ocean floor crust will take more pressure before giving in, literally, and thrusting down into the earth's core, creating valleys.
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