The Laurentian Abyss is an underwater depression off of the eastern coast of Canada in the Atlantic Ocean[1] . Not a trench, but more of an "underwater valley", it is estimated to be at most ~600 meters in depth. The Laurentian Abyss is a product of glaciation and water currents from the Saint Lawrence Seaway.[2] {{
The trench is populated by hydrothermal vents with their own ecosystems independent of sunlight.[3]
Use in fiction
The Laurentian Abyss has been a feature of at least two pieces of fiction media.
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 leader of the Decepticons, Megatron and the other five 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; the actual deepest point is the Challenger Deep, a section of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
Encyclopedia
top
