Random Facts Thread.

nivek

As Above So Below
Cruising at a depth of 8,336 meters (over 27,000 feet) just above the seabed, a young snailfish has become the deepest fish ever filmed by scientists during a probe into the abyss of the northern Pacific Ocean. Scientists from University of Western Australia and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology released footage of the snailfish on Sunday filmed last September by sea robots in deep trenches off Japan.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG1je9DDzbg


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nivek

As Above So Below
A Brazilian football referee that stabbed a player to death, which resulted in the crowd storming the pitch, stoning him to death, beheading him, and quartering him before finally sticking his head on a stake on the pitch in 2013.

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wwkirk

Divine
nambu 3.jpg
In the jungle fighting of the Pacific War the deadliness of the “Nambu Light,” as it commonly was known, was legendary. Its accuracy, mobility, reliability, and skillful use by Japanese gunners who sought glory in death made a fearful combination. The Nambu was subsequently credited with causing ‘more Allied casualties in the Pacific and Far East theatres than any other weapon.’

The Type 96 Nambu light machine gun was of indigenous design and was created by Japan’s most prominent arms designer, Lieutenant General Kijiro Nambu.

Type 96 Machine Gun
Country of Origin Japan
Type Machine Gun
Caliber 6.500 mm
Capacity 30 rounds
Length 1.070 m
Barrel Length 550.000 mm
Weight 9.100 kg
Rate of Fire 550 rounds/min
Muzzle Velocity 735 m/s

Japanese Type 96 Nambu LMG in action early 1942 in China. (Photo: Japanese wartime pictorial magazine.)
nambu 2.jpg

Type 96 Nambus captured at Guadalcanal. (Photo: U.S. Military Intelligence Service)
nambu 1.jpg
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
Adolf-Hitler-Duke-and-Duchess-of-Windsor.jpg
King Edward VIII had a secret agreement with Hitler to return to the throne as his puppet king .
 

nivek

As Above So Below
In 1783, a boy was born with two heads. The second head was upside down, with the neck pointed straight up. Shockingly, the second head was fully functional. The boy claimed he could hear the other brain telling him things. He died at 4 years old from a cobra bite.

The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal was a child born in India with a rare parasitic twin condition called craniopagus parasiticus, in which a second, fully formed head was conjoined to the top of his own. Today, his skull can be viewed on request at the Hunterian Museum of medical history in London.
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nivek

As Above So Below
In 34 U.S. states, women are legally allowed to go topless anywhere a man can. The practice is only explicitly illegal in two states, with the remaining 14 having ambiguous legal situations.

Topless freedom in the United States


1280px-Female_toplessness_laws_in_the_United_States_by_State_and_Territory.svg.png


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wwkirk

Divine
Allied Guerilla Lady, aka The Naga Queen
Bowers.jpg

Ursula Graham Bower spent some years as an anthropologist among the Nagas of the Naga Hills. She took more than a thousand photographs documenting the lives of local tribes which were later used in a comparative study.

Here she won the friendship and confidence of the local village headmen, so that when the Japanese armies invaded Burma in 1942 and threatened to move on into India, the British administration asked her to form her local Nagas into a band of scouts to comb the jungle for the Japanese. Bower mobilised the Nagas against the Japanese forces, placing herself at their head, initially leading 150 Nagas armed only with ancient muzzle-loading guns across some 800 square miles (2,100 km2) of mountainous jungle. General Slim recognised the work she was doing and supported her with arms and reinforcements, giving her her own unit within V Force, nicknamed "Bower Force". Bower's force of Nagas became so effective that the Japanese put a price on her head. She was the subject of an American comic book entitled Jungle Queen. Her personal weapon of choice was the Sten gun, two of which she wore out in action. Trained as a child by her father to shoot, she had no qualms about handling firearms and training her Naga scouts in their use.

On 24 April 1945 she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire for her actions in Burma, and in 1944 she received the Lawrence Memorial Medal, named for Lawrence of Arabia, for her anthropological work among the Nagas.
methode_times_prod_web_bin_a2686148-ecb1-11e7-8850-c8e01ac6f9d5.jpg
 

wwkirk

Divine

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
How many shipwrecks are there in the world's oceans?

How many shipwrecks are there in the world's oceans?​


The shipwreck of the SS Thistlegorm in the Red Sea, Egypt (Credit: Alamy)

By Zaria Gorvett
https://twitter.com/@ZariaGorvett
11th June 2023

This week UNESCO announced it has found three new shipwrecks, including two that are thousands of years old. But just how many more could be out there?
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When Elias Stadiatis descended into the indigo-blue water, he had a normal day of searching for sponges ahead of him. Weighed down in a copper diving suit, surrounded by a tangle of breathing tubes, Stadiatis eventually reached the seafloor. As he squinted into the dim, he took in a haunting scene: all around were the fuzzy outlines of human body parts. As he surfaced in a pool of bubbles, he frantically informed the captain he'd found a heap of rotting corpses.
It was the spring of 1900, and Stadiatis had accidentally discovered the Antikythera shipwreck – the remains of a Roman cargo vessel that had sunk more than two millennia earlier. It soon became clear that it was not teeming with cadavers, as it first seemed, but artworks – marble sculptures and bronze statues, seasoned by thousands of years among algae, sponges and fish.
More than 100 years on, the relics at Antikythera, found off the coast of a Greek island on the edge of the Aegean Sea, are still captivating the public. But there are plenty of submerged wonders still waiting to be discovered.
Take the recent Unesco expedition to Skerki Bank, a particularly treacherous shallow reef that links the eastern and western Mediterranean. It has been heavily used for thousands of years – and in that time, it has claimed hundreds of ships. Using multibeam sonar and underwater robots, a team of scientists from eight countries mapped the seafloor in the region. This week, they announced the discovery of three new wrecks: the ghostly remains of boats dating to the 1st Century BC, 2nd Century AD, and 19th or 20th Century.
And according to Unesco's estimates there could be many, many more undiscovered wrecks still to be found beneath the waves of the world's oceans.
A hidden record
The oldest known boat was found by accident while a motorway was being built in The Netherlands – a wooden canoe crafted over 10,000 years ago. But there's circumstantial evidence it all started far earlier, with humans suddenly appearing on the other side of vast bodies of water. Around 50,000 years ago, it's thought that a group of hunter-gatherers from Southeast Asia must have crossed a band of islands hundreds of miles long, because soon afterwards the first Australian Aboriginals turned up at Lake Mungo in New South Wales.
And where there are sea crossings, there are wrecks. Today the world's oceans are scattered with the debris of millennia of trade, war and exploration – pirate ships loaded with silver, cargo boats along the maritime Silk Road, luxury royal craft that disappeared along with future kings, ancient fishing vessels, modern destroyers and submarines, 19th-Century whalers, and vast passenger liners like the Titanic. Like long-forgotten time capsules, these ships have captivated archaeologists and filled museums around the globe with ancient wonders – including a mysterious astronomical clock from Antikythera, which some experts view as the earliest computer.
So, how many are there in total – and how many still remain hidden in the depths of the ocean?

The Antikythera shipwreck has yielded an ancient cargo of precious marble sculptures and bronze statues, among other objects (Credit: Getty Images)

The Antikythera shipwreck has yielded an ancient cargo of precious marble sculptures and bronze statues, among other objects (Credit: Getty Images)
There are several databases of the world's shipwrecks, each of which has a slightly different estimate for the total number that has been found. The online service wreck site has a catalogue of 209,640 boats known to have sunk, 179,110 of which have a known location. The Global Maritime Wrecks Database (GMWD), on the other hand, contains the records of more than 250,000 sunken vessels, though some of these still haven't been found.
According to one estimate, around 15,000 ships sank during World War Two alone – there are forgotten battleships and tankers strewn from the Pacific to the Atlantic, gradually bleeding oil, chemicals and heavy metals into the surrounding water as they decay.
In fact, it's thought the shipwrecks that have been documented only represent a small fraction of the total. According to an analysis by Unesco, there are over three million resting undiscovered in the world's oceans.
These elusive relics are unlikely to be evenly distributed. As you would expect, there are a number of wreck hotspots – maritime graveyards along popular or perilous routes, which have proved to be fertile hunting grounds in the past.
This includes Skerki Bank, as well as the Fourni archipelago, also in the Mediterranean, where 58 ships have been discovered so far – including 23 in just 22 days in 2015. While Fourni archipelago wasn't considered particularly dangerous, it was commonly used as an anchorage point, so it's thought the sheer volume of traffic led to a high concentration of vessels coming to rest there.
A treasure trove
Not only does this hidden cache of as-yet-undiscovered wrecks contain fascinating details of how people once lived – and possible hazards for the future – it can also contain mind-boggling riches. And this can be problematic.
At around 7pm on 8 June 1708, a powerful explosion echoed across the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Colombia. It was the last battle cry of San José, a galleon that had set sail from Spain two years earlier. The boat was part of the Spanish treasure fleet – a convoy of boats, loaded with sugar, spices, precious metals, and other goods, transported between Spain and its territories in the Americas.
As the flagship, San José was carrying a mother-lode – chests of silver, emeralds, and an enormous quantity of gold doubloons. But it came to a violent end during a confrontation with a British ship. After hours of battle, its stores of gunpowder took a hit, and it sank almost immediately – vanishing into the ocean along with nearly 600 crew members.
Over 300 years later, in 2015, the Colombian navy finally identified its broken remains, along with cannons, ceramics, and coins. In all, its cargo is worth an estimated $17bn (£13.5bn). But the find immediately led to a bitter battle over who owns the wreck. Now there are concerns that the archaeological site will be plundered rather than protected.


Since the San José was discovered, researchers have found two more centuries-old shipwrecks in the waters off the coast of Colombia
A golden age
These kinds of disputes could soon become a lot more common.
In the past, many shipwrecks were found in relatively shallow waters, sometimes by accident, as fishermen, scientists or treasure-hunters explored the seabed around the world's coastlines. But with access to sophisticated submersibles, modern camera equipment and new sonar technologies, finding deeper shipwrecks has never been so easy.
It's now possible to build up a picture of the ocean floor even in the deepest water – in 2019, researchers discovered the resting place of the destroyer USS Johnston 6km (3.7 miles) deep in the Philippine Trench. (Read more from BBC Future about how the world's deepest shipwreck was found.) Then earlier this year, scientists built a digital twin of the Titanic in three dimensions, based on surveys of the wreck on the Atlantic Ocean floor.
As a result, the oceans are giving up their secrets at an unprecedented rate.Just as the use of sonar and GPS tracking has transformed fishing - allowing whole shoals of once-elusive tuna to be identified in the open ocean - anyone can now use these same technologies to find shipwrecks in locations never previously suspected.
But for now, there are still plenty of undiscovered wrecks lurking in the deep – including some of the most famous. Take the Waratah, a gigantic passenger ship often compared to the Titanic. She set sail from Durban to Cape Town on 26 July 1909 with 211 passengers on board, then vanished. To this day, no one knows what happened or where exactly the behemoth sank: despite at least nine expeditions to search for her remains, none have ever been found.
Who knows what will turn up next. Only one thing is certain: it won't be long until we find out.
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Yellow tropical fish and coral (Credit: Getty Images)

By Nicola Jones8th June 2023

From Yale e360

Global warming not only increases ocean temperatures, it triggers a cascade of effects that are stripping the seas of oxygen.
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Off the coast of south-east China, one particular fish species is booming: the oddly named Bombay duck, a long, slim fish with a distinctive, gaping jaw and a texture like jelly. When research ships trawl the seafloor off that coast, they now catch upwards of 440lb (200kg) of the gelatinous fish per hour — a more than tenfold increase over a decade ago. "It's monstrous," says University of British Columbia fisheries researcher Daniel Pauly of the explosion in numbers.
The reason for this mass invasion, says Pauly, is extremely low oxygen levels in these polluted waters. Fish species that can't cope with less oxygen have fled, while the Bombay duck, part of a small subset of species that is physiologically better able to deal with less oxygen, has moved in.
The boom is making some people happy, since Bombay duck is perfectly edible. But the influx provides a peek at a bleak future for China and for the planet as a whole. As the atmosphere warms, oceans around the world are becoming ever more deprived of oxygen, forcing many species to migrate from their usual homes. Researchers expect many places to experience a decline in species diversity, ending up with just those few species that can cope with the harsher conditions. Lack of ecosystem diversity means lack of resilience. "Deoxygenation is a big problem," Pauly summarises.
Our future ocean – warmer and oxygen-deprived – will not only hold fewer kinds of fish, but also smaller, stunted fish and, to add insult to injury, more greenhouse-gas producing bacteria, scientists say. The tropics will empty as fish move to more oxygenated waters, says Pauly, and those specialist fish already living at the poles will face extinction.

Fish in warmer waters have a higher metabolism and need more oxygen (Credit: Getty Images)

Fish in warmer waters have a higher metabolism and need more oxygen (Credit: Getty Images)
Researchers complain that the oxygen problem doesn't get the attention it deserves, with ocean acidification and warming grabbing the bulk of both news headlines and academic research. Just this April, for example, headlines screamed that global surface waters were hotter than they have ever been — a shockingly balmy average of 21C (70F). That's obviously not good for marine life. But when researchers take the time to compare the three effects — warming, acidification, and deoxygenation — the impacts of low oxygen are the worst.
"That's not so surprising," says Wilco Verberk, an eco-physiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. "If you run out of oxygen, the other problems are inconsequential." Fish, like other animals, need to breathe.
Oxygen levels in the world's oceans have already dropped more than 2% between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to 7% below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others – the top of the north-east Pacific has lost more than 15% of its oxygen. According to the Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2019 special report on the oceans, from 1970 to 2010, the volume of "oxygen minimum zones" in the global oceans – where big fish can't thrive but jellyfish can – increased by between 3% and 8%.
The oxygen drop is driven by a few factors. First, the laws of physics dictate that warmer water can hold less dissolved gas than cooler water (this is why a warm soda is less fizzy than a cold one). As our world warms, the surface waters of our oceans lose oxygen, in addition to other dissolved gases. This simple solubility effect accounts for about half of the observed oxygen loss seen so far in the upper 1,000m (3,3300ft) of the ocean.

Deeper down, oxygen levels are largely governed by currents that mix surface waters downward, and this too is being affected by climate change. Melting ice adds fresh, less-dense water that resists downward mixing in key regions, and the high rate of atmospheric warming at the poles, as compared to the equator, also dampens winds that drive ocean currents.
Finally, bacteria living in the water, which feed off phytoplankton and other organic gunk as it falls to the seafloor, consume oxygen. This effect can be massive along coastlines, where fertiliser run-off feeds algae blooms, which in turn feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria. This creates ever more "dead zones," including the infamous one in the Gulf of Mexico.
Researchers have even suggested that the rise of microplastics pollution has the potential to exacerbate the low-oxygen problem. This theory predicts that if zooplankton fill up on microplastics instead of phytoplankton — their usual prey — the latter will proliferate, again feeding all those oxygen-gobbling bacteria on their way to the seafloor.
As oxygen levels fall, jellyfish are expected to increase in number, scientists say (Credit: Getty Images)

As oxygen levels fall, jellyfish are expected to increase in number, scientists say (Credit: Getty Images)
The Global Ocean Oxygen Network — a scientific group set up as part of the United Nation's Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030 – reports that since the 1960s, the area of low-oxygen water in the open ocean has increased by 1.7 million sq miles (4.14 million sq km). That's an area a little more than half the size of Canada. By 2080, a 2021 study reported, more than 70% of the global oceans will experience noticeable deoxygenation.
In 2018, hundreds of researchers concerned with oxygen loss signed the Kiel Declaration to urgently call for more awareness of the problem, alongside work to limit pollution and warming. Researchers are now in the midst of establishing a Global Ocean Oxygen Database and ATlas (GO2DAT) to consolidate and map all the data.
Andrew Babbin, a biogeochemist at MIT who is on the steering committee for GO2DAT, in 2021 mapped out huge areas of extremely low oxygen in the Pacific. "It's concerning for sure," says Babbin, who hopes to repeat the mapping exercise in a decade or so to see how things change. One issue, he notes, is that low-oxygen conditions tend to host a class of anoxic bacteria that produce methane or nitrous oxide — potent greenhouse gases.
Modelling the net impacts of the three factors – solubility, mixing, and microbiology – has proven tricky. "Any one of those is hard," says Babbin. "And then you put them all together, and it's dramatically difficult to make any predictions." In the tropics, for example, one model suggests that a shifting balance of biological factors that deplete oxygen, versus ocean mixing that delivers oxygen, will drive oxygen levels down until about 2150 but then raise them — a spot of potentially good news for tropical fish. On the whole, though, climate models seem to have underestimated changes in oxygen levels, which have been dropping faster than expected.
The impacts on marine life are going to be complicated – and not good.

Fish already expend tens of times more energy to breathe than people do​

In general, a hot fish has a higher metabolism and needs more oxygen. Trout, for example, need five to six times more dissolved oxygen when waters are a balmy 24C (75F) than when they are a chilly 5C (41F). So as waters warm and the oxygen seeps out, many marine creatures take a double hit. "Fish require a lot of oxygen, particularly the large ones we like to eat," says Babbin.
Right now, there are about 6 milligrams of oxygen per litre of seawater in the tropics, and 11 milligrams per litre at the colder poles. If levels drop below 2 milligrams per litre (a 60% to 80% reduction), as they often do in some patches, the water is officially hypoxic – too low in oxygen to sustain many species. But subtler drops can also have a big impact. Fish already expend tens of times more energy to breathe than people do, notes Pauly, since they must pump the paltry oxygen out of viscous water.
The effects of low oxygen are well known to mountaineers, who experience headaches and potentially fatal confusion at high altitudes. Fish often try to swim away from low oxygen waters, but if they can't escape, they become sluggish. Low oxygen levels affect almost everything across the board, including fish growth, reproduction, activity levels, and outright survival. A host of genetic and metabolic changes can help fish conserve energy, but only within limits. In general, larger fish are more affected simply because their body-volume-to-gill ratio is larger, making it harder to feed their cells with oxygen. Overfishing has already had the effect of decreasing the number of large fish in the ocean; deoxygenation looks set to exacerbate that effect, says Verberk.
The long-term chronic effects of slightly decreased oxygen levels are harder to evaluate than the short-term effects of hypoxia, says Verberk, and researchers have urgently called for more research on the subject. "For mild hypoxia over longer terms, there's not that many studies, but it's likely to have quite a strong impact," he says. "If you continually have 7% less energy [from 7% less oxygen], that's going to accumulate to quite a large deficit."
Larger fish such as tuna may be more adversely affected by falling oxygen levels (Credit: Getty Images)

Larger fish such as tuna may be more adversely affected by falling oxygen levels (Credit: Getty Images)
Fish are already moving to find more oxygen. Those living in deeper waters may move down to colder, and therefore more oxygenated waters, while fish living in the top few hundred metres of the water column, like coastal rockfish, may move toward the surface to catch a breath. In a study of California reef fish from 1995 to 2009, 23 species moved up an average of 8.7m (28.7ft) per decade toward the surface as oxygen levels declined. In the tropical north-east Atlantic, tuna have been driven into a narrower layer of water by oxygen declines; overall, they lost 15% of their available habitat from 1960 to 2010.
While warming and deoxygenation often go hand in hand, the two effects are not completely matched everywhere, all the time, says Verberk. The result is a patchwork of areas too hot or too low in oxygen for various fish to thrive, leading to a mishmash of different escape routes. Researchers are currently trying to trying to map the anticipated effects for different species, studying how temperature and oxygen might restrict their future habitats and how those ranges will overlap with each other.

Once in waters where they can breathe, fish will then have to see what food they can find – and what predators they need to avoid. "Low oxygen is going to be a trigger to move to other places, but those other places are not empty," says Verberk. "They will encounter other animals living there. It's going to change competitive interactions between species." Crabs, says Pauly, are currently marching on the Antarctic as those waters warm and will feast on unprotected molluscs. "There will be a mass destruction," he says.
Over the past century, says Pauly, the greatest pressure on marine life has been overfishing, which has caused huge declines in fish numbers. That could change. If we get overfishing under control, he continues, climate-related pressures will pose the biggest problem for marine life in the coming decades. A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a four-fold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.
If you chart out the trends in warming and oxygen loss, the cataclysmic endpoint for the ocean thousands of years from now would be "a soup that you that you cannot live in", says Pauly. The ocean already has sporadic hypoxic zones, he says, "but you could imagine all the dead zones of the world coalescing into one, and that is the end of the thing." If we don't get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, he says, "we have to expect this to happen."
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable

How the world's deepest shipwreck was found​


Despite the depth, many of the USS Johnston’s guns appeared to be relatively intact after 75 years in the deep (Credit: Caladan Oceanic)

By Stephen Dowling24th January 2022

In 1944, the USS Johnston sank after a battle against the world's largest battleship. More than 75 years later, her wreck was finally located, 6km (3.7 miles) below the waves.

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On 23 October 1944, the first engagements of a gigantic naval battle began in Leyte Gulf, part of the Philippine Sea. It was the biggest in modern human history.
Over the following three days, more than 300 US warships faced off against some 70 Japanese vessels. The Americans had with them no fewer than 34 aircraft carriers – only slightly fewer than all the carriers in service around the world today – and some 1,500 aircraft. Their air fleet outnumbered the Japanese five to one.

Best of 2022​

This article is part of BBC Future's "Best of 2022" collection, where we bring you some of our favourite stories from the past 12 months. Discover more of our picks here.
The battle had two major effects – it prevented the Japanese interfering with the American invasion of the Philippines (which had been captured by the Japanese nearly four years earlier) and effectively knocked the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) out of action for the rest of World War Two. Nearly 30 Japanese ships were sunk, and many of the remainder – including the biggest battleship ever built, the Yamato – would be so badly damaged they would be largely confined to port for the rest of the war.
While the wider battle largely saw the US outnumber the Japanese fleet, one crucial action was different. A small force – Task Force 77, mainly destroyers and unarmoured aircraft carriers – found itself battling a much larger Japanese formation.
The battle took place off the island of Samar. Massively outnumbered, the small US flotilla fought against overwhelming odds, pressing home their attack against the much larger and better-armed Japanese ships.
The US resistance was so fierce that it prompted the Japanese commander, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, to turn his fleet around, believing he was now facing the bulk of the US forces. The small, relatively unarmoured American destroyers came as close as possible to the Japanese warships, preventing them using their powerful long-range guns. The small US force prevented a potential massacre, but their resistance came at a heavy cost. Five of the 13 US ships were sunk.
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One of them was a destroyer called USS Johnston. Just after 07:00, Johnston was hit by shells from the Yamato, but fought for another two hours, peppering much larger enemy ships with shells and scaring off a flotilla of IJN destroyers trying to attack the lightly armed American aircraft carriers. It was only after two hours of fighting, with the ship hit by dozens of shells and its survivors clinging to the rear of the battered vessel, the ship finally sank, taking with it 186 of her 327 crew. Survivors reported one of the Japanese destroyer captains saluting as it slid beneath the waves.
But Johnston's story was not over.
***
Most of the world's shipwrecks are found in shallow coastal waters. Ships follow trade routes to ports, and coastal waters offer the chance of sanctuary if the weather turns nasty. So this is where most ships founder and sink. But the waters Johnston sank in are very different. Rather than a smooth decline, they instead drop steeply to great depths.
Samar Island sits on the edge of a vast marine canyon known as the Philippine Trench, which runs for some 820 miles (1,320km) along the Philippines and Indonesian coastline. It skirts around the eastern side of Samar Island, on the seaward side of Leyte Gulf. It is very, very deep. If you were to drop Mt Everest at the deepest point of the Philippine Trench, the Galathea Depth, its summit would still be more than a mile (1.6km) underwater.
The deep waters USS Johnston sank in lie off Samar, the third-largest island in the Philippines (Credit: Joemill Fordelis/Getty Images)

The deep waters USS Johnston sank in lie off Samar, the third-largest island in the Philippines (Credit: Joemill Fordelis/Getty Images)
No-one knows quite how long it took for USS Johnston to reach the ocean floor. It sank through layer after layer of the Philippine Sea, distinct stages which grow ever darker, colder and inhospitable. Past 100m (328ft) sunlight would have begun to fade. Past 200m (656ft) Johnston would have entered the twilight zone, a vast layer nearly a kilometre deep which marks the end of the effect of the Sun's light on the ocean. The temperature would have plummeted the further it sank. At 1,000m (3,280ft) Johnston's ruptured hull would have plunged through waters only a few degrees above freezing into what oceanographers call the Bathyal Zone, also known as the midnight zone.
No plants or phytoplankton grow here as the Sun's light cannot penetrate this far down. The water is freezing cold and this gloomy zone is sparsely inhabited by life. The animals that do live here have evolved to do so in cold and relentless dark. Eyes are useless, and so are fast-twitch muscle fibres, which elsewhere prey might rely upon to escape predators. But down here they consume too much energy to be worth it. The fish that live here look little like the ones that swim near the surface. They are soft and slippery to the touch. Some are blind and others almost transparent. What use are camouflaging scales when your predators – nightmarish creatures that hang suspended in the dark – have no eyes?
The average depth of the world's oceans is 3,688m (12,100ft), more than two miles deep. It is in waters as deep as this that the RMS Titanic sank on its ill-fated maiden voyage in 1912. But Johnston's death dive went far, far beyond this.
Past 4,000m (13,123ft) is the Abyssal Zone, with water temperatures hovering just above freezing and dissolved oxygen only about three-quarters that at the ocean surface. The pressure is so intense that most creatures cannot live here. Those that do differ from their shallow-water cousins in almost every way – fish have antifreeze in their blood to keep it flowing in the intense cold, while their cells contain special proteins that help them resist the intense water pressure that would otherwise crush them. But the ocean goes deeper still.
Drop further and there is the Hadal Zone, another layer found below 6,000m (19,685ft) from the surface. The Hadal Zone is found in the deepest ocean trenches, mostly in the Pacific Ocean, where giant tectonic plates push together far beneath the waves. Danish oceanographer Anton Frederik Bruun coined the term in 1950s, when technology had advanced enough for the first cautious exploration of these submarine chasms. The term hadal came from Hades, the Ancient Greek god of the underworld. It is in complete darkness, temperatures hover just about freezing, and the pressure is around 1,000 times that at sea level.
Finally, this is where the bottom of the Philippine Trench emerges. Many of the points measured along its length are around 10,000m (32,808ft or 6.2 miles) deep and at its lowest point reaches 10,540m (34,580ft) below sea level.
The Titanic sank in water only two-thirds as deep as the Galathea Deep (Credit: Xavier Desmier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

The Titanic sank in water only two-thirds as deep as the Galathea Deep (Credit: Xavier Desmier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Somewhere within this vast underwater trench, the USS Johnston finally came to rest. But the exact location was very difficult to predict. The ocean's surface is by no means featureless, but its anonymity can make finding the exact locations of naval battles a challenging task. There are no monuments, and no topographical features which aid identification. Underneath the waves, currents and tidal patterns can pull wrecks far from the spot where they sank.
It would be 75 years before human beings saw Johnston again. The first was Victor Vescovo.
Vescovo, 54, is a former US Navy intelligence officer turned private equity manager with a passion for exploring and oceanography. He has climbed Mt Everest and visited both the North and South Poles.

I thought it would be an interesting attempt to try and find the wreck – Victor Vescovo​

"I've been a hardcore mountain climber for 20-25 years, and when I'd pretty much done many of the things I wanted to do there, I was looking for a different challenge and I viewed it as a nice symmetrical thing to do, let's go to the deep oceans," he tells BBC Future from his home in Texas. "And it turned out that no-one had been to the bottom of all five of the world oceans. They'd never even been to the bottom of four of them."
Self-described as "technically minded", he believed the issue wasn't one of technology but of funding. "It'd be really expensive – but it is doable," he says. "So I cut the cheque, and got the team together, and for the next three years we designed and built the deepest-diving submersible in history that's able to do it repeatedly, which has never existed before, and then we took it around the world." Vescovo tested his new submarine, called Limiting Factor, by diving solo to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench – the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean and two-thirds the depth of the deepest point in the world's oceans.
Early in 2020, Vescovo was taking part in a scientific mission with a Filipino oceanographer. They became the first people to dive to the bottom of the Philippine Trench. "It just so happened that a day north of there is the battlefield off Samar," he says. "I've been a 'military historian' since I was a small child and I was also in the US Navy for 20 years, so I knew a lot about the battle. I thought it would be an interesting attempt to try and find the wreck."
Victor Vescovo is a former naval intelligence officer who now funds exploration missions to the deep ocean (Credit: Mike Marsland/Getty Images)

Victor Vescovo is a former naval intelligence officer who now funds exploration missions to the deep ocean (Credit: Mike Marsland/Getty Images)
Vescovo's attempt wasn't the first – the story of Johnston had captivated many explorers and oceanographers over the decades. "The Vulcan Organisation had been going around the world finding World War Two wrecks for many years. But they were limited in their ability to go deeper than 6,000m (19,685ft), because they only use remotely operated vehicles. So, they actually found the wreckage of the Johnston – they were trying to find the deepest wreck as well – but they only found a portion of it and it was not really recognisable."
Finding the Johnston was made more challenging because a similar destroyer, USS Hoel, was also sunk in the same engagement. "They couldn't positively identify that it was the Johnston," Vescovo says. "And they couldn't go deeper. Their rated limit for their remotely operated vehicle was 6,000m (19,685ft). They could see that there was more debris down lower, so they pushed it down another 200m (656ft), risking it imploding, but they weren't able to see the majority of the wreckage."

On our first dive we're down there for four hours and we find nothing – Victor Vescovo​

The Vulcan's mission had almost proved where Johnston lay, but the crushing pressure of the deep Pacific Ocean had prevented them from settling any doubt. Vescovo believed his newly designed submarine might confirm it. While the Vulcan team did not share the location, Vescovo says "there were enough clues in the open source that I put my intelligence officer hat on and we were able to close in on where it probably was".
Vescovo and naval historian Parks Stephenson ventured beneath the waves in the submarine in the hope of coming across the wreck.
"He'd never actually done any sub diving before," says Vescovo. "I told him: 'Strange things happen down there.' The visibility is terrible, it's very confusing once you go down below 500m (640ft) or 1,000m (3,280ft), let alone 6,000m (19,685ft). And everything is harder. He was like, 'No, no, no I'm 99% convinced we are going to find it, it's here.' Sure enough, on our first dive we're down there for four hours and we find nothing."
A second dive also failed to reveal any sign of the wreckage, so they moved to a new location for their third dive. This time was more successful and they rediscovered the debris field that the Vulcan submersible had previously found.
"With my submarine I was able to follow the trail of where the ship had gouged a V into the hillside underwater, and we followed it down another 500m (1,650ft) and that's when we found the front two-thirds of the ship in brilliant, intact form, with the [naval identification] number right there – 557. Positive identification."
The Japanese forces at Leyte Gulf included the Yamato, the biggest battleship ever built (Credit: Getty Images)

The Japanese forces at Leyte Gulf included the Yamato, the biggest battleship ever built (Credit: Getty Images)
Johnston's final resting place was more than 6km (3.7 miles) deep. "It's half again as deep as where the Titanic is – and that's pretty damn deep, that's 4,000m (13,123ft)," says Vescovo. "What was so interesting about this wreck, it was about as one-twentieth the size of the Titanic so it's a lot smaller."
The work required to find wrecks at such depths is deliberate and painstaking. "It's all about finding the so-called 'blood trail', finding a piece of wreckage and finding another one and then localising it," Vescovo says. "Because the ocean is really, really, really big and wrecks are very, very, very small."
Only a small fraction of the world's oceans plunge below 6,000m (19,685ft), so there has been little impetus to fund technology to explore them. Vescovo has other ideas. "Because I want to go deeper and look for things on the bottom, right now we're developing a sonar suite, side-looking sonar that actually can operate to 10,000m (32,808ft), it's never been developed before."

It's a long, long way down, and the environment there is just unbelievably harsh – Victor Vescovo​

The new sonar suite, if it comes to pass, will allow Vescovo's submarine to make a map of the ocean floor in swathes up to 1.5km (one mile) wide "so we can actually do deep ocean searches for wrecks or anything else that's on the bottom of the ocean", the explorer says.
The first tests using this new side-looking sonar will take place in spring 2022 – off Samar Island. "We're going to use the Johnston," Vescovo says, "we're going to use the Johnston as a way to double-check the sonar to make sure it works properly, and then we're going to take it even deeper, where we are pretty sure the Gambier Bay, the Hoel and some of the Japanese wrecks are, even deeper. They could be in 8,000m (26,246ft), but no-one has any idea where they are, and we hope we're going to find them."
***
If you were to drop a pebble over the side of a boat above Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench – the deepest of the ocean's deepest places – it would take more than an hour for it to finally reach the bottom. "It takes us four-and-a-half," says Vescovo, "and the submarine is designed to go up and down fast! It's a long, long way down, and the environment there is just unbelievably harsh. When you go from sea level to outer space, you go from one atmosphere pressure to zero, it's a vacuum. When you go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you're going from one atmosphere to 1,100, immersed in salt water, and it's freezing cold. It is just torture for anything physical." One of Vescovo's biggest challenges was how to make sure everything from batteries to propulsion systems on the submarine would continue working at such crushing depths, dive after dive.
The aircraft carrier Gambier Bay was one of the other US ships sunk during the battle (Credit: Corbis/Getty Images)

The aircraft carrier Gambier Bay was one of the other US ships sunk during the battle (Credit: Corbis/Getty Images)
Limiting Factor's missions to this inhospitable secret world have, little by little, helped grow the small club of humans who have seen the deepest point in the ocean. "Before we started our endeavour three years ago, only three people had been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and something like 12 people had walked on the surface of the Moon," he says. "We've now changed that – I've been able to take 15 people to the bottom of Challenger. Now, more people have been in space than have been to the bottom of Challenger, but we're trying to keep up," he adds.
Once the vessel has plunged beneath the choppy surface waters, "it's remarkably peaceful", says Vescovo. "At the surface, you're bobbing around but once you get under the water it gets really quiet, you just hear the whirr of the fans, and it gets dark pretty fast actually, at 500m (1,640ft) there's no sunlight. There's even no sense of motion, the sub can be gently spinning and you don't even realise it. And creatures stay away from the submarine, or you just don't see them because the portals are so small, so it's like you're in a little time machine, you're just sitting there.
"I'm monitoring everything, making sure things are going OK, but the passengers they wait until we get to the bottom. The joke we have is that when you're on the way down, a minute feels like five minutes because you want to get there and you're excited. When you get to the bottom a minute feels like a second because there's so much going on, you're looking outside, you're excited, and then a minute going up is like an hour, because you just want to get to the surface."

Monsters of the deep?​

What life at great depth really looks like​

At depths such as the one at which Johnston found itself, storytellers once imagined the realm of strange creatures, an inky-black monster's lair. But this frigid expanse is mostly – at least to the naked eye – devoid of life.
"People get a bit disappointed, they want the big scary monsters, they almost assume the deeper you go the bigger and scarier the monsters get, like Godzilla. It's actually the reverse. The deeper you go, the harsher the environment is, and large animals can't survive. Fish can't survive at full ocean depth. But what can survive is bacteria and microbes, which are no less important evolutionarily and biologically, and very small creatures like little shrimp. Some of them can absorb aluminium into their bodies to act as armour against the pressure. Or very small seaworms – things that don't make people go ooh or ahh, but they're extremely specialised, and from a scientific standpoint that makes them extremely interesting."
"I'm monitoring everything, making sure things are going OK, but the passengers they wait until we get to the bottom. The joke we have is that when you're on the way down, a minute feels like five minutes because you want to get there and you're excited. When you get to the bottom a minute feels like a second because there's so much going on, you're looking outside, you're excited, and then a minute going up is like an hour, because you just want to get to the surface."
Vescovo's missions to long-lost warships such as the Johnston follow a very simple rule: look but don't touch. "Any military wrecks remain the property of the country that they're from, regardless of where they are, so you cannot take anything from them unless you have their permission. Same with the Johnston. So we were very respectful, we did not touch the wreck, we did not take anything. But people also do not realise whether it's the Titanic or the Johnston, these wrecks are so deep and the saltwater so corrosive that there are no bodies, clothing isn't there, it disintegrates. It's an empty mausoleum that's more of a symbol of the people that died there."
But not all the descendants of those who have died want the last resting place of their relatives disturbed. The wrecks may be invisible, far below the ocean's surface, but the relatives of those who died sometimes have strong feelings.
Vescovo has encountered resistance before over plans to inspect another wreck, the infamous USS Indianapolis. Sent on a secret mission to deliver the first atomic bomb to a bomber base in the Northern Marianas, the Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and the 900 surviving crew members were left to drift for four days, with nearly 600 dying from dehydration, exposure or shark attack.
"I thought about diving [it] last year, but there was such an outcry from the veterans' families, they said they didn't want me to dive it, I said 'ok, fine I won't dive it'," says Vescovo. "They were very vocal about they didn't want me disturbing the wreck.
"The groups associated with all the wrecks seems to be different. For example, people were very supportive of my dive to the Johnston, maybe because it hadn't been identified, and the Indianapolis had been identified… but you just have to be respectful of their wishes, it was their family members who died. I'm not going to be an interloper and do what the heck I want and ignore everybody's wishes."
The number 557 visible on the side was proof Vescovo and his team had found the right ship (Credit: Caladan Oceanic)

The number 557 visible on the side was proof Vescovo and his team had found the right ship (Credit: Caladan Oceanic)
Vescovo’s missions rely on a very specialised set of skills. "I have the certification as a submarine test pilot, which is something I don't think you really want to have, but when we were developing and building it, we did have a couple of situations where electronics failed or there was a puff of smoke in the capsule – which is decidedly not cool – but even in that case we had back-up systems and emergency action plans. I've never felt like my life was in danger.
"The most dangerous dive I've ever done was on the Titanic, and that's because the Titanic is very, very big, there are wires and there are ropes and there are cables. The biggest danger to a submersible is actually entanglement, and that happens around wrecks. Unlike when James Cameron dove the Titanic – he dove with two submersibles – I dove solo in one. If I got entangled, I was left to my own resources to get out. That can be a little tricky. And no-one can come get us."
With no natural light, hazards only appear when they come into range of the sub's lights. "The Johnston actually gave me a little bit of a surprise," Vescovo says. "We went around her and at the very back end of her, she actually had a pretty large piece of metal about 15ft long, jutting out at a right angle, and when you're in a submersible you can't see that well. We're going around and I was like 'Holy ****' You don't know how sharp it is or the angle, and it's possible it could snare the submarine. That would be a bad day. I'm sure we could get out, we have a lot of power on the submarine and we can eject stuff off, but you don't ever, ever want to be in a situation where you're actually having to figure out a way to get off of something in a submersible when you're 6,000m 19,685ft) down."
The discovery showed that Johnston sank relatively intact, despite the enormous damage inflicted by the guns of the Japanese warships.

Steel doesn't lie – Victor Vescovo​

"Johnston was so deep, even deeper than the Titanic, there was less corrosion, less life on it, so it looked more pristine than Titanic did, it didn't have all the hanging stalactites, the rusticles. You could see the battle scars on the ship where the shells had come in and hit it, the guns were still trained to the right, the ship still looked like it was fighting."
Visiting deep wrecks such as the Johnston offers far more than just bragging rights though. It can also help piece together information that might be missing from the heat of battle.
"We are amateur historians, and while we read the histories and people think they know what happened in the battle, it's very confusing in battle, and what we say is steel doesn't lie," says Vescovo. By really closely investigating the shell holes, even the angle of the shells, we can have the wreck tell us a story of what happened. It's one more point of view of the battle. It's pretty irrefutable compared to human memory, which can get pretty confused. Already from the wreck we've discovered things that people didn't realise about the battle."
Vescovo's investigations, he believes, lend weight to the idea Johnston had been hit by Yamato, the largest battleship ever built. "It was the Yamato that actually delivered the first killing blows on her… why does anyone care? This was the largest battleship ever constructed by man, and it was taken on by a little American destroyer. It was David and Goliath. And the Yamato actually left – she chased her away."
Vescovo says the wreck still had its guns pointing towards where the Japanese ships were when it sank (Credit: Caladan Oceanic)

Vescovo says the wreck still had its guns pointing towards where the Japanese ships were when it sank (Credit: Caladan Oceanic)
The giant naval battles waged across the world's oceans in the 20th Century are a rich world for explorers such as Vescovo to discover. "I'd love to find the Japanese wrecks from Midway," he says, referring to the four Japanese aircraft carriers sunk at a pivotal naval battle in 1942. "Those would be extraordinary to find because those are iconic ships of the Japanese navy, they hold a lot of pride for the Japanese people it would be nice to identify them."
There is another vessel on Vescovo's list too: the Yamato herself. In April 1945 the gigantic ship was ordered on a one-way mission to disrupt the American landings on the island of Okinawa. Yamato's commander had been told to beach the ship and use it to bombard the America invasion. Surprised by a huge fleet of American aircraft, it was sunk with the loss of more than 3,000 lives. "She actually only lies in about 300 (984ft) or 350m (1,148ft) of water," says Vescovo. "It has been visited, at least by a robot, but I don't know if it's been visited by human before. Now, I would be extremely sensitive about that, because it's such an important wreck for the Japanese people. I would never even attempt to dive that wreck without their assent, their involvement."
Vescovo wants to visit the wreck of the Yamato, which was sunk by US aircraft in April 1945 (Credit: Getty Images)

Vescovo wants to visit the wreck of the Yamato, which was sunk by US aircraft in April 1945 (Credit: Getty Images)
The ocean explorer Sylvia Earle has been a prominent advocate for further exploration of our hidden undersea world, saying to NPR in 2012 that "we haven't made the investment in understanding what's there. Only about 5% has even been seen, let alone explored". Vescovo is a similar enthusiast, especially for those very deep places that have remained hidden from human eyes.
"Those have huge implications for marine biology, marine virology but also geology, looking at the rocks and plate tectonics and all that," he says. "And then there's just mapping – 80% of the ocean seafloor is unmapped, and we want to go and run around and map those just because that's something that should be done.
"The beauty of the ocean is because it's so unexplored, it's like a tragedy of riches. Where do you want to go now? Anywhere you go is going to be new. Where do you start?"
* Stephen Dowling is BBC Future’s deputy editor. He tweets at @kosmofoto
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I used to live in rural Pennsylvania, and had limited familiarity with the Amish, even meeting some once or twice. But I never realized that
The Amish May Utilize Modern Technology!
From Wiki:
The avoidance of technologies by Old Order Anabaptist communities is based not on a belief that the technology is in some way evil, but over a concern for the nature of their communities. Community is important to members of Old Order Anabaptist groups, and a technology or practice is rejected if it would adversely affect it. This means that the prohibitions are not usually absolute; a member who would not own a car may accept a ride in a car or other modern transport if a pressing need arises. This basis also means that most Old Orders see no contradiction in having electricity in their milking barn, since that is necessary to comply with regulations on milk cooling, but not in their house.
amish.jpg

The following website discusses the nuances of Amish utilization of modern tech.
 
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