Oceanic Trenches

On your expedition to chart the ocean floor of the Atlantic, you encountered some of the flattest and highest features found on Earth.

Had you started in another part of the United States, you would have encountered one of the deepest places on Earth — an ocean trench.

Just off the northern coast of Puerto Rico, where the Caribbean and North American plates intersect, lies the Puerto Rico trench, a scar in the ocean floor 497 miles long and 28,373 feet at its deepest. The Puerto Rico trench is something of an anomaly. Out of the 22 trenches that exist, 16 are in the Western Pacific. All of these trenches were formed by forces created by convergent plates.

Although some of these trenches are almost seven miles deep, whenever scientists have visited these places, they have found life despite the difficult living conditions.

Essential Questions

• What is the process of subduction?
• What is the deepest ocean trench?
• How do trenches form?