Hi
Which statement is correct? Is Challenger Deep the deepest point on earth or merely the deepest point of the Pacific Ocean? I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
Wikipedia
The Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the Earth’s seabed hydrosphere, with a depth of 10,898 to 10,916m (35,755 to 35,814ft) by direct measurement from submersibles, and slightly more by sonar bathymetry (see below).
National Geographic
The Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep—the deepest point on Earth—looks as bleak and barren as the moon, according to James Cameron, who successfully returned just hours ago from the first solo dive to the ocean abyss.
It seems to me that it does say it, right there in the bit you quote: “The Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the Earth’s seabed hydrosphere”. The qualification to the hydrosphere is just to exclude such things as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which is deeper, but in a rather different sense, and anyway is artificial. (I suppose in principle there might also be natural caves that go deeper, but I do not think any are actually known.)
That website is interesting, but includes something strange: Item #7, the South Sandwich Trench, is illustrated with a picture of the island of Hawaii. This is among the original Sandwich Islands - indeed it’s the southernmost of these - but has nothing whatever to do with their southern-hemisphere cousins (located some 8500 miles southwest).
Not only is no such cave known (the deepest extends somewhat below 2000 meters), I don’t believe any natural process is known that could produce a cave anywhere near that deep.
“The deepest point on Earth” has no meaning in itself. You could easily say that the deepest point is the center of the Earth. Certainly there are billions of points deeper than the Mariana Trench.
The Wikipedia quote is phrased much more precisely. The National Geographic article is an example of how common speech is too loose and depends too much on assumptions to be useful in a scientific context. Unless you already know and understand that the meaning is “deepest known point in the Earth’s seabed hydrosphere” it’s totally useless as a sentence.