Free Republic

The Mariana Trench is the deepest spot in the world's oceans and only a handful of people have been there. But for the first time, travellers are being offered the opportunity to explore it - if they have a spare $100,000 to $200,000 (£83,000 to £166,000). Isle of Man-based Eyos Expeditions is offering three members of the public the chance to tag along on a dive it's organising to a spot in the Western Pacific trench known as Challenger Deep - 35,853ft (10,928 metres/6.79 miles) beneath the surface. It is, the company says, the most exclusive destination on the planet.

As Earth's tectonic plates dive beneath one another, they drag three times as much water into the planet's interior as previously thought. Those are the results of a new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature. Using the natural seismic rumblings of the earthquake-prone subduction zone at the Marianas trench, where the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the Philippine plate, researchers were able to estimate how much water gets incorporated into the rocks that dive deep below the surface. The find has major ramifications for understanding Earth's deep water cycle, wrote  marine geology and geophysics researcher Donna Shillington...