Bottomless
Bottomless
Scroll down and keep going
There is a bottom. It is a very long way from here.
Sea level. Nothing has gone wrong yet.
The shallow end. A lifeguard is already watching you.
Six feet under, the traditional depth for people who stop scrolling.
The deep end of a hotel pool, where most confidence turns around.
A city canal. Thirty rusted bicycles and one shopping trolley.
The pool under a ten metre diving platform, built exactly deep enough to stop you.
Every ten metres of water adds another atmosphere of pressure. Your ears knew first.
The limit on a first scuba certificate. Past this you need more paperwork.
The bottom of the Suez Canal, dredged to here and not one spade deeper.
Nitrogen starts making divers feel clever around now. It is lying to them.
The recreational scuba limit, where a hobby quietly becomes a qualification.
The average depth of the Baltic Sea, which is essentially a very cold puddle.
The deepest diving pool ever built ends here. We are only getting started.
Less than one percent of the daylight is left. Red disappeared ages ago.
The Channel Tunnel at its lowest point, with trains and sandwiches passing through.
One metre lower sits the deepest metro station in the world, in Chongqing.
A fig tree in South Africa pushed roots this far down looking for water.
An unopened box marked kitchen, sitting where it landed three house moves ago.
The end of the sunlight zone. Photosynthesis clocks off for good.
The deepest free dive on record. Sled down, balloon up, one breath.
The deepest scuba dive ever completed. Twelve minutes down, fifteen hours back.
An emperor penguin has been recorded this deep. It does that for lunch.
The midnight zone begins. Sunlight has never once made it this far.
The floor of the deepest lake on Earth, and it is fresh water the whole way down.
A blind springtail was found at this depth in a cave. No eyes, no plans, no rush.
The bottom of the deepest cave yet explored. Two caves in one mountain keep swapping the title.
The deepest dive measured on an elephant seal, which treats it as a commute.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel, with two and a half kilometres of Alp sitting on the roof.
The deepest whale dive ever recorded. Nearly four hours on a single breath.
The deepest shark ever confirmed, getting on with things in total darkness.
The average depth of the ocean. Everything above this was the shallow part.
The wreck of the Titanic, in two pieces, being slowly eaten by rust bacteria.
The floor of the deepest mine ever dug. Ice gets pumped down to make it survivable.
Living microbes have been pulled out of rock this deep, eating stone very slowly.
The hadal zone starts here, named after Hades, because scientists enjoy themselves.
The deepest shipwreck ever found, a destroyer escort lost in 1944.
A dumbo octopus was filmed at this depth, flapping past like a lost umbrella.
The deepest fish ever filmed, a snailfish with the structural integrity of a wet tissue.
The deepest point of the Atlantic. The Pacific finds this adorable.
Turn Mount Everest upside down and the summit would sit exactly here.
A plastic bag was photographed at this depth in the Mariana Trench. Naturally.
The bottom of the Challenger Deep. There is no deeper water anywhere on the planet.
The deepest hole ever drilled. They stopped when the rock went soft and hot.
Below every hole humans have dug. From here the facts get noticeably looser.
The sock layer. Every sock that went into a washing machine with a partner and came out alone.
A seam of borrowed biros, all out of ink, none of them ever returned.
Compressed gym memberships, laid down every January, still being charged monthly.
The hair grip stratum. Dense, faintly glittering, older than agriculture.
A car park, level minus nine hundred. Plenty of spaces.
The base of the continental crust. Under here the rock stops belonging to anyone.
The mantle. Solid rock that flows, like a traffic jam with geological patience.
The complaints department for the mantle. Current waiting time is two hundred million years.
A shale of unread terms and conditions, every one of them accepted.
The charger graveyard, sorted neatly by connector, none of them the one you need.
The asthenosphere, where rock behaves like extremely serious honey.
Diamonds form around this depth and then get sent upstairs as a treat.
A vault in the rock holding every message you were definitely going to reply to.
A slab of old sea floor sinking through, still damp, still holding a grudge.
The transition zone, where minerals repack themselves into tighter shapes under the strain.
More water than every ocean combined is locked inside the crystals around here.
The lower mantle. Everything below is under pressure it refuses to discuss.
The deepest earthquakes ever recorded happen at this depth and nobody is certain why.
Last known position of a shopping trolley. Still rolling, still one wonky wheel.
A landfill of good intentions, quietly smouldering since the Bronze Age.
The rock down here is packed with everything anyone ever said they would do at the weekend.
Someone left a light on down here. It has been on since the Cretaceous.
The outer core. Liquid iron, moving fast enough to run the entire magnetic field.
Iron weather. Storms of molten metal, no forecast, no umbrellas.
The umbrella current, circulating forever, not one of them opening.
The inner core. Solid iron, about as hot as the surface of the Sun, held together by pressure.
The centre of the Earth. Technically you are climbing now. We will say nothing.
Out the other side of the arithmetic. The planet ran out a while back.
A suggestion box out here, bolted to nothing at all. Nobody has ever emptied it.
One unopened email from 2011 drifting past, marked urgent, still waiting.
The bottom. There is no bottom, we just ran out of jokes, which is nearly the same thing.
The bottom
You have run out of shaft. That took some doing.
How to play Bottomless
Scroll down, then keep scrolling. The shaft runs from the surface to a punchline, and every so often a marker tells you what sits at that depth. On a phone, swipe or drag the shaft upward. On a computer, use the wheel or the trackpad, hold the down arrow to keep falling, or press space for one big drop. Home pops you back to the surface. Your depth ticks up in the header while you sink and your deepest ever is saved between visits. Press surface whenever you want to stop and you get a card with how far down you got.
Tips
- Everything down to 12,262 metres is a real depth, checked against published figures.
- Hold the down arrow instead of wearing out your scroll wheel.
- One extra oddity is tucked in at a fresh depth every day.
- Press surface any time, your deepest is saved either way.
About Bottomless
People are bad at guessing how deep things go. A swimming pool feels deep. The recreational scuba limit is only 40 metres, and the deepest hole anyone has ever drilled stopped at 12,262 metres, which is not even halfway through the continental crust. Bottomless puts all of that on one long vertical scroll so the distances land properly instead of sitting in a table. The real depths were checked against published figures, including the 10,935 metre floor of the Challenger Deep and the snailfish filmed at 8,336 metres that holds the record for the deepest fish ever seen. Below the drilled rock the shaft carries on into things that are not real at all.
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