Laurentian Abyss

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Laurentian Abyss is a trench in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Canada. ^[1] It has a maximum depth of 15,305.11 feet or about 2.9 miles (4,665 meters) below the surface.

The trench is populated by hydrothermal vents with their own ecosystems independent of sunlight.^[2]

[edit] Use in fiction

The Laurentian Abyss, perhaps because of its famous depth, has been featured in various mediums of fiction.

It was featured as the covert rendezvous point for Soviet and American submarines in the 1990 technothriller film "The Hunt for Red October"- the idea being that the Americans could claim that the defecting Soviet submarine had sunk there, a claim the Soviets would have no way of verifying due to the difficulties of searching at such depths. This location, however, was not used in the original 1984 novel by Tom Clancy.

In the 2007 live-action film "Transformers", the remains of the defeated Decepticons are dropped into the abyss by the U.S. Armed Forces. It is theorized that the pressure and extremely low temperatures at this depth would crush and bury the evil alien robots, thus rendering them nonfunctional and hopefully destroyed. (However, the film erroneously states that the abyss is the deepest point on Earth, at 7 miles deep; the actual deepest point is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, over twice as deep [10,911 m (35,797.24 feet) versus 4,665 m (15,305.11 feet)].