These are factors that impact the nature of the world from the highest mountain peak to the deepest ocean trench.

CNN: An SOS on World Oceans Day: Save our seas, save ourselves

The key was not to try to dig a Suez-type of canal, a great sea-level trench from ocean to ocean, but to create a lock-and-lake canal, where the ships are lifted up by a series of locks to a man-made lake, and then they sail across that lake, and then they are set back down on the other side by another series of locks.

FORBES: Fact and Comment

The billionaires are bankrolling expeditions to reach the deepest place in the ocean, a spot called the Challenger Deep that lies at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seven miles below the surface of the South Pacific.

FORBES: Branson And Schmidt Race To The Bottom Of The Ocean

In 1960 Don Walsh, along with Jacques Piccard, undertook an eight-and-a-half hour decent in the bathyscaphe Trieste to the deepest part of the ocean, the 10, 911 metre (36, 000ft) Challenger's Deep in the Mariana Trench off the coast of the Phillipines.

BBC: Voyage to the 'real' North Pole