This is beautiful, thanks. Why not linking the creatures to their English Wikipedia pages to get curious folks more background? Wikimedia Foundation employee here in private comment. Just learnt the first time about the Leatherback Sea Turtle here.
I wonder what prevents a fish that goes down to 100 meters from going down to 300 meters or 3000 meters. Does it feel an internal pressure that tells it to not dive further, or is it the amount of light or availability of food it seeks? Since fish wouldn't suffer from decompression sickness, I wonder if they could dive much deeper if they wanted to.<p>Now that I think about it, I've scuba dived to 130 feet and it didn't feel any different to me than being at 10 feet. The only reason I didn't go deeper is because the depth gauge, divermaster, and training told me not to go deeper, and not because I was feeling the pressure.
I kept thinking "wow, that <i>has</i> to be the deepest diving air breathing animal here," and I kept being amazed at how deep some animals can dive.
Beautiful! A really important article about how we’re about to start mining these regions on an unprecedented scale: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-feet-under-the-sea/603040/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-f...</a>
Holy moly. The human diving at 332 meters is insane. That’s 34 ata, or 34 times the atmospheric pressure, or 34x compression on your body. Did they use some sort of inverse pressurized suit that can hold this sort of pressure ? I’ve scuba dived to 50m and even that was a bit dizzy for the brain. People have known to hallucinate if they stay deep too long. 330+ meters is absolute nuts. Wow! Someone explain me the science of how this is possible.
It reminds me of another scrolling experience, "If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system" (<a href="https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html" rel="nofollow">https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....</a>).
On mobile, my URL bar being displayed adds about 2 meters to the depth that any given creature can survive. I suggest that divers start putting URL bars at the top of their masks.
The site mentions the Trieste reaching Challenger Deep and how a window cracked on the way down. I can't imagine wanting to reach it so badly that they'd risk the implosion. I guess death at that depth has the benefit of being instant.
The content and presentation is fantastic.<p>The page is using up 15-20% CPU and GPU when it is the active tab even when not scrolling. That seems unexpected and unfortunate.<p>(I noticed because by the time I got to 3400 meters, my laptop's fans became audible.)
I was Googling some creatures that caught my eye, including the Megamouth Shark at 4600 meters. The sources I read put it at 1000 meters at the deepest, but preferring much shallower waters. Am I overlooking something?<p>Regardless, fun and interesting webpage!
If you enjoyed this and also like playing games, treat yourself with Subnautica. It‘s very good at giving you the feeling of how I would think it would feel to have to survive on an ocean covered planet, including diving into the depths.<p><a href="https://www.unknownworlds.com/subnautica" rel="nofollow">https://www.unknownworlds.com/subnautica</a>
would be nice to have citations of the facts and links to the creatures. For example, I was interested if it's true that giant isopod could live for 5 years without food and couldn't find any credible information
I was expecting a Cthulhu reference at the deepest point for good fun! Nicely done, but would be nice to also provide indicators of pressure and temperature on the side as you go down.
> 6000 m: "More people have been to the Moon than the Hadal Zone."<p>I wish some bored billionaires would take up the challenge and pump their billions into deep sea research. Like some others do for space exploration.<p>> "So little is known about life in these deep environments. Almost every expedition uncovers something new."
Wow I felt increasing anxiety / claustrophobia as I scrolled deeper and deeper. I can’t imagine what it was like for those two in that tiny sub. A mix of that and elation/excitement at pushing the frontier of man forward
This looks like it might be cool but it's completely unusable for me in Firefox on a 2012 rMBP. It makes the browser nearly unresponsive, taking about 15 seconds to go back to the previous page.
Wow, that was a more visceral experience than what I anticipated. I felt more and more uncomfortable the deeper I went...
Conclusion: I’d rather go to the Moon.
Note that “the oldest species of <x>” doesn’t make any sense. Both that species as well as its closest evolutionary relative have a last common ancestor, meaning they are equally “old”.<p>Do this a few times and you will notice <i>all</i> species have the same “age”, assuming life today all descendent from a common ancestor. Yes, some of them have may have changed more or less in appearance, but that correlates poorly with genetic changes.
>ELEPHANT SEAL DIVE<p>>2400 METERS DEEP<p>That one caught me off guard. I'm used to seeing stories (or "tales") of e.g. Sperm Whales accomplishing incredible dives like that. An elephant seal doesn't really seem to be tuned to that kind of performance dives.
Amazing to know elephant seal and cuviers beaked whale dived so deep.<p>One additional info that could be included is that of submarines and their depth rating.
As cool as it is, this link is probably being posted a little bit too often:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=neal.fun" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=neal.fun</a>