But it highlights the problems… so poorly defined question, and so much territory for it to be in… what sort of place can it be ? a crack ? something filled with methane ? a (impossible to navigate) long cave ? What if there is a trench filled with mud… a suitably designed submarine could go into the mud… but we don’t know it exists because no on bothers to investigate all the oceans looking for mud filled trenches… Oh well that just means the definition has to be "the deepest (as measured by distance from centre) KNOWN part of the ocean "
The closest point is not necessarily the deepest point since earth is an oblate spheroid, first reported by Sir Isaac Newton. I believe that the difference in the semidiameters from the poles and the equator is 13 km. Litke Deep is located at 82.4N and 20E. At this latitude the difference between the pole and Litke Deep is negligible, and the Deep is 5,450 metres deep. As such, it is the closest known point to the centre of the planet. And it is accessible.
Can we put this to bed?
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(Yes, I realize this is a zombie)
How the heck is that “accessible to man”?
You can use an online calculator to compute the Earth’s radius by latitude.
Challenger Deep is at 11.373N and the radius 6377.312 km.
Litke is at 82.4N with a sea level radius of 6357.129 km. This is already 20 km below Challenger, so it wins easily. The radius at depth is 6351.679 km.
The radius at 90N is 6356.752, or 377 m below Litke. There’s nothing on this list north of Litke but deeper than 5073 m.
There are a few intermediate trenches in the list that could have been in the running. The most promising:
Kuril–Kamchatka Trench
47.5N
10,542 m depth
6356.09 km radius at depth
South Sandwich Trench
55.42S
8,428 m depth
6355.249 radius at depth
So quite a lot better than Challenger Deep, but not as deep as Litke.
First theorized by Newton. It wasn’t actually shown until a few hundred years later.