
The Deep Sea - thereyougo
https://neal.fun/deep-sea/
======
Volker-E
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.

~~~
lifeformed
This kind of content reminds me of Microsoft Encarta. It would be really neat
if there were lots of visualizations and interactive educational sites that
shared many links to Wikipedia, and have them all compiled somewhere on some
Wikimedia page.

~~~
Volker-E
Same here, after I wrote my comment, my next thought was what ways there could
be enabled to have similar content on Wikimedia projects. The rules around
Wikipedia projects (encyclopedic content, an article content narrated along an
axis, as in meters here) and moderation are the hurdles from my POV. But then
again, maybe it's simpler/better to have folks taking free content, putting it
in a narration on their sites and linking back to Wikipedia as part of
distributed Web.

~~~
zozbot234
Wikimedia projects are not limited to strictly encyclopedic stuff. A
visualization about the deep sea could easily be allowed on Wikiversity, which
is intended for miscellaneous educational material that doesn't easily find
its way elsewhere. The biggest obstacle would be technical.

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alister
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.

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.

~~~
peripitea
This is because you are artificially pressurized by the air you're breathing
when scuba diving that deep. If you held your breath and went that deep, you
would definitely feel the pressure.

~~~
Aeolun
I think you can already feel that pressure when holding your breath and diving
just 3m deep.

~~~
peripitea
Yep. It continues to become more intense as you go deeper. You can wreck your
lungs going to even 20-30m if you haven't trained them to handle the pressure.

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hoorayimhelping
I kept thinking "wow, that _has_ to be the deepest diving air breathing animal
here," and I kept being amazed at how deep some animals can dive.

~~~
Barrin92
I was super surprised by the penguins, the emperor penguin dives 500 meters
deep? That's impressive

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tectonic
Beautiful! A really important article about how we’re about to start mining
these regions on an unprecedented scale:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-f...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-feet-
under-the-sea/603040/)

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nojvek
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.

~~~
McDyver
Very broadly, when scuba diving you're breathing gas at the same pressure of
the depth at which you are. So the deeper you go, the greater the pressure of
the gas that is being dissolved into your tissues. You don't feel this
pressure, only the pressure in the body's "hollow" spaces, like sinuses,
Eustachian tubes. That's why you need to equalise on the way down.

When you dive to 50m, the feeling of "being dizzy" happens when diving on air.
This is due to Nitrogen narcosis. To minimise this, in technical diving,
helium is added to the mix, to reduce the percentage of nitrogen and minimise
the narcosis.

Going down to 332m, as you correctly say subjects you to a pressure of 34 Bar.
To dive this deep you need to be breathing 4% Oxygen, maximum (compared to 21%
that is in air we breathe at the surface). At this level, making the mix needs
to be extremely precise and you need to be sure your instruments are properly
calibrated, as a 5% mix can potentially kill you at that depth.

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stared
It reminds me of another scrolling experience, "If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel
- A tediously accurate map of the solar system"
([https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)).

~~~
dugmartin
There is a space object size visualization on that same site that is worth a
look:

[https://neal.fun/size-of-space/](https://neal.fun/size-of-space/)

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blotter_paper
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.

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wishinghand
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.

~~~
kh_hk
If you are interested, one of piccard books, Au Fond Des Mers en Bathyscaphe,
explains everything from a personal perspective. It contains many engineering
details that are deeply interesting

~~~
lovecg
Do you by any chance mean “Seven Miles Down: The Story of the Bathyscaph
Trieste” by Jacques Piccard? I can only find the title you mentioned by
Auguste Piccard, a different explorer.

~~~
kh_hk
Father and son

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dmitshur
The content and presentation is fantastic.

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.

(I noticed because by the time I got to 3400 meters, my laptop's fans became
audible.)

~~~
system2
Same, dell xps13 is on fire. GPU 99%, cpu 30%. Unsure why.

~~~
pc86
Is there any [good] reason for this not to be a static site?

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luhn
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?

Regardless, fun and interesting webpage!

~~~
wyck
I see sources citing 4600m and also 1500m (as normal), but some footnotes and
referances to The Deep Sea stats would be nice.

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retendo
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.

[https://www.unknownworlds.com/subnautica](https://www.unknownworlds.com/subnautica)

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buryat
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

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ekianjo
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.

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aliceryhl
Huh, penguins can dive deep.

~~~
wrnr
Yea, that would be like me running to the night-shop to get beer and run back
home, all the while holding my breath.

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C14L
> 6000 m: "More people have been to the Moon than the Hadal Zone."

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.

> "So little is known about life in these deep environments. Almost every
> expedition uncovers something new."

~~~
georgewsinger
[https://www.businessinsider.com/ray-dalio-ocean-
exploration-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/ray-dalio-ocean-
exploration-2019-4)

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mikebelanger
Nice! Also liked the trivia 'snuck' into certain depths, like the deepest
scuba dive at 332 meters.

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rwmj
Elephant Seals dive to 2400 meters and Cuviers Whales to 3000 meters? That's
incredible for a mammal.

~~~
Exmoor
Beaked whales in general are fascinating. Only a fraction of a percent of
people will likely every see one and only a fraction of those people will even
know that they're seeing something more notable than any other whale. They're
incredibly poorly understood to the point where there are very possibly
species that are completely unknown to science.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaked_whale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaked_whale)

~~~
pvaldes
> Only a fraction of a percent of people will likely every see one

And I'm in that fraction, muahahahaha. ;-)

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xivzgrev
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

~~~
bmn__
[https://old.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia](https://old.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia)

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latahGatah
This is really cool. I showed my son and they use it in his science class.

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driverdan
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.

~~~
herewego
I’m on an iPhone X on Firefox and it’s a very smooth experience.

~~~
wh1t3n01s3
My iPhone X on brave got really hot tough

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uvesten
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.

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shaki-dora
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”.

Do this a few times and you will notice _all_ 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.

~~~
wtracy
"Oldest" in the sense that it has existed (as far as we can measure) in it's
current form longer than any other species.

You can't say that a species is as old as it's ancestral species, because
you're talking about two different species.

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the_arun
I guess humans cannot stand suspense. I wanted to see what is in the end but
gave up after 1.5K meters.

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remarkEon
>ELEPHANT SEAL DIVE

>2400 METERS DEEP

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.

~~~
dddddaviddddd
[http://www.coml.org/comlfiles/press/CoML_Beyond_Sunlight_11....](http://www.coml.org/comlfiles/press/CoML_Beyond_Sunlight_11.17.2009_Public.pdf)

~~~
remarkEon
Fascinating Sunday read, thanks.

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unicornporn
Very nice! But, penguins at sub 500 meters? Honestly, wtf are you doing down
there!?

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buryat
my ipad overheated while browsing the page

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billfruit
Amazing to know elephant seal and cuviers beaked whale dived so deep.

One additional info that could be included is that of submarines and their
depth rating.

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mto
Time for another round of Subnautica

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pvaldes
I forgot the number of Jewel squids that I measured. I'm very fond of them,
yep.

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almost_usual
Great site, it brought back nostalgia of reading deep sea books as a kid.

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dnhz
That's a lot of water that we're acidifying

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TenJack
Wow, didn't know polar bears could go that deep.

~~~
itronitron
Elephant seals can apparently dive much much deeper (2,388 m) which completely
surprised me as well.

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shabirgilkar
Is there any documentary which takes us this deep?

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Andromeda88
Throughoutly enjoyed it. Thanks for the good work.

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dsfyu404ed
This really goes to show you how far species we normally think of as living
mostly near the surface will go in search of a meal.

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FpUser
Very nicely done. Congratulations

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sabujp
i was not expecting to see an elephant seal at 2392 meters!

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chupa-chups
As cool as it is, this link is probably being posted a little bit too often:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=neal.fun](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=neal.fun)

~~~
dang
On HN, an article doesn't count as a dupe if it hasn't had significant
attention yet. One user isn't allowed to repost the same article more than a
small number of times (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)),
but when the same article is posted by many different submitters, that's often
an indication that it's interesting. Because of that, we invited Yuval_Halevi
to repost it, since he was the first user to submit it in the first place.
Invited reposts get put in the second-chance pool (described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)),
which is why this one made it to the front page.

