Drop a Steel Ball Into the Mariana Trench — It'll Fall for 4 Hours

Feel free to like and subscribe to our team at @planetwithin as we explore Earth science, natural disasters, hidden geography, and the mysteries shaping our planet. Thank you! The Mariana Trench reaches nearly seven miles beneath the surface, where the pressure is more than a thousand times greater than at sea level. A steel ball descending through that enormous column of water would be affected by gravity, drag, buoyancy, currents, and increasingly dense seawater. We calculate how the journey might unfold and explore what conditions the ball would encounter before reaching the deepest seafloor on Earth. What object would you drop into the Mariana Trench as a scientific experiment?