How Much Pressure Is 3,000 Meters Down? Drag to Find Out

Slide from the surface to the Challenger Deep and see the pressure, the load on each square centimetre, and which animals and people have actually been that deep, with a source for every record.

Last updated: 2026-09-26

Core summary

The deepest dive any air-breathing animal has on record, a Cuvier's beaked whale at 2,992 m, sits at about 298 atmospheres. The deepest dive by a crewed vessel, 10,934 m in the Challenger Deep, sits at about 1,086. The whale's record pressure is 27% of the sub's. Seven records are charted below, each with its source.

Drag to a depth

0 m

Pressure

1 atm

On each cm²

1.0 kg

A 6-litre breath becomes

6.0 L

Human freediver (no limits)

253.2 m · atm

Herbert Nitsch, Santorini, 6 June 2012, on one breath and a weighted sled. He suffered severe decompression sickness afterward. The older 214 m dive (2007) is the mark AIDA still recognizes, because AIDA no longer sanctions no-limits events.

Source: Herbert Nitsch (Wikipedia, citing Guinness World Records)
Sperm whale, routine hunting dive

610 m (routine, not a record) · atm

NOAA describes hunting dives that "routinely reach depths of 2,000 feet" (about 610 m) and last around 45 minutes. This is a typical dive, not a record; individual sperm whales are reported to go deeper, but we did not find a primary-source maximum we could verify.

Source: NOAA Fisheries, Sperm Whale species page
Narwhal

1,776 m · atm

Deepest dive recorded to date per Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington Polar Science Center, whose team tags narwhals in Greenland.

Source: Narwhal FAQ, Kristin Laidre, UW Polar Science Center
Southern elephant seal

2,388 m · atm

Held the mammal depth record until the 2014 beaked whale study; that paper cites 2,388 m as the previous mammal record.

Source: CSIRO, "Meet the ocean's deepest diving animals"
Cuvier's beaked whale

2,992 m · atm

Satellite-tag record of 2,992 m and 137.5 minutes, off Southern California, in a study of eight whales. It replaced the elephant seal as the deepest mammal dive on record.

Source: Schorr et al. (2014), PLOS ONE 9(3): e92633
Snailfish (deepest fish filmed)

8,336 m · atm

A Pseudoliparis snailfish filmed in August 2022 in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench off Japan by a team led by Alan Jamieson. It is a fish, so no lungs to worry about.

Source: Natural History Museum, "Deepest-ever fish filmed at a depth of 8,336 metres"
Crewed submersible (Challenger Deep)

10,934 m · atm

Victor Vescovo, Challenger Deep, 26 June 2020, listed by Guinness World Records as the deepest dive by a crewed vessel. He sat in a titanium hull at surface pressure; the sub took the squeeze.

Source: Guinness World Records, deepest dive by a crewed vessel

How the pressure numbers are worked out

Pressure at depth is the weight of the water above you plus the air above that. We use seawater at 1,025 kg per cubic meter and standard gravity, which comes to about 0.0992 atmospheres per meter, plus 1 atmosphere at the surface. That treats seawater as incompressible. Real seawater squeezes slightly under its own weight, so this method reads about 1% high at 11 km (roughly 1,086 atm here, against about 1,072 atm from the full seawater equation). Small next to the uncertainty in the dive records themselves.

The "6-litre breath" box applies Boyle's law to a sealed pocket of gas: the volume shrinks in proportion to the pressure. It is an illustration of what pressure does to air, not a model of a real lung, which is not a sealed balloon.

What counts as a record here

Every depth was checked against the page linked on its card. Records come from tagged animals and a handful of well-documented expeditions, so "record" means the deepest dive reported so far, not the deepest possible one. The sperm whale entry is a routine hunting depth from NOAA, marked as such, because we did not find a maximum we could verify. Deep dives by other species almost certainly exist that no tag has caught.

Data and citation

Download the records as CSV (name, type, depth, status, pressure, source URL).

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FactCrumbs. "How Much Pressure Is 3,000 Meters Down? Drag to Find Out". FactCrumbs, 2026-09-26. https://factcrumbs.com/deep-dive-pressure/

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More on the animals: narwhals and sperm whales.

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Sources and method