Challenger Deep · 11°22′N 142°35′E · three guests per dive

The last unexplored place on Earth is 11 km down.

Abyssal takes three guests at a time to the deepest point of the ocean, in a titanium submersible built for nothing else. The round trip is nine hours. Four of them are spent on the floor.

Reserve a seat Begin the descent

Zone 01 / 050 — 200 m

Sunlight Epipelagic

The first two hundred metres hold most of the ocean's life and all of its sunlight. Pelagia leaves the A-frame at 06:40 and falls through it in three minutes. Look up while you can: the surface is a moving ceiling of light, and you will not see anything like it for the next nine hours.

Temperature: 27 → 19 °C
Pressure: 1 → 21 atm
Light: 100 → 1 %
Elapsed: 0:00 → 0:03

You'll seeChambered nautilus rising from their daytime depth, bait balls of bigeye scad, and caustics sliding over the hull.

Zone 02 / 05200 — 1,000 m

Twilight Mesopelagic

Red is the first colour the water takes from you. By 300 m Pelagia's orange hull reads as wet slate; by 600 m everything is one shade of blue. This is where animals start making their own light. At 750 m the floodlights come on, and colour comes back with them.

Temperature: 19 → 4 °C
Pressure: 21 → 100 atm
Light: 1 → 0 %, blue only
Elapsed: 0:03 → 0:17

You'll seeAtolla and crown jellies pulsing blue alarms, lanternfish on their nightly climb, the last grey trace of the sun.

Zone 03 / 051,000 — 4,000 m

Midnight Bathypelagic

No sunlight has ever reached this water. The only light down here is made by the living, and most of it is bait. An anglerfish can wait months for a meal; she lets the lure do the hunting. Keep the floodlights moving. She is closer than she looks.

Temperature: 4 → 1.5 °C
Pressure: 100 → 398 atm
Light: None, ever
Elapsed: 0:17 → 1:07

You'll seeHumpback anglerfish, vampire squid, and marine snow — the slow fall of everything that died above you.

Zone 04 / 054,000 — 6,000 m

Abyss Abyssopelagic

The abyssal plain looks empty until it doesn't. On the trench lip at 4,970 m a black smoker vents water at 380 °C, kept liquid by the pressure. Around it grow tube worms with no mouth and no gut, fed by bacteria that eat sulphur. Life, it turns out, never needed the sun.

Temperature: 1.5 °C · vent 380 °C
Pressure: 398 → 596 atm
Light: Vent glow only
Elapsed: 1:07 → 1:40

You'll seeGiant tube worms, vent crabs, mussel beds, and water shimmering as it leaves the chimney.

Zone 05 / 056,000 — 10,935 m

Hadal Hadopelagic

Named for Hades. Until 2019, more people had walked on the Moon than had stood here. The pressure is over seven tonnes on every square inch of the sphere, and the silt is so fine it hangs in the lights like smoke. We touch down beside Beacon 07, still pinging on the spot where we first landed.

Temperature: 1.5 → 2.4 °C
Pressure: 596 → 1,086 atm
Bottom time: 4 h
Elapsed: 1:40 → 3:02

You'll seeAmphipods the length of your hand, sea cucumbers walking on the silt, and the deepest footprint on the planet: yours.

The vessel

Pelagia

Four people, one titanium sphere, and a hull built around the idea that nothing should need to go right for you to come home.

Crew: 1 pilot + 3 guests
Rated depth: 11,000 m, full ocean
Descent: 1.0 m/s · 3 h 02 min
Length / mass: 4.6 m · 11.8 t
Dives completed: 61

01 ·

Expedition 2027

One dive. Three seats. Eleven kilometres.

Per seat, all-inclusive from Guam

US$ 750,000

Nine days aboard the support ship Halcyon, from Apra Harbor
Two training dives to 1,000 m before the full descent
Four hours on the floor of the Challenger Deep
Every external camera, in 8K, delivered on the voyage home
A vial of hadal silt, engraved with your coordinates

Window	Dates	Swell forecast	Seats
CD-27·01	08 — 19 Feb 2027	0.8 m	1 left
CD-27·02	05 — 16 Apr 2027	1.1 m	3 left
CD-27·03	06 — 17 Dec 2027	1.4 m	Waitlist

Request a seat

A refundable deposit of 10% holds your seat. Medical and a pool session in Guam are the only requirements.

Crew & safety

Every system has two backups. The third is gravity.

Chief pilot

Ines Marlow

212 dives, 31 to full ocean depth. Twelve years in submarine rescue before this. Speaks very little on the way down, and all of it is useful.

Sphere & systems

Kenji Aoba

Designed Pelagia's life-support loop and still inspects every O-ring on the sphere hatch himself, twice, with the ship's clocks stopped.

Hadal biologist

Dr. Adaeze Okafor

Has described four species of amphipod and will name, on the intercom, everything that moves in the lights. Bring questions.

3independent ways up: drop weights, jettisonable batteries, and a corrodible link that frees the ballast on its own after 24 h
96 hof emergency life support behind the 16 h mission loop
2 minbetween acoustic check-ins with the surface, the whole way down
61 / 0dives completed / incidents