And then of course, that dissolved nitrogen coming out of solution as you ascend and the pressure reduces is what causes the bends.

The other issue with high pressure is that some of the elements in the air you breathe will start dissolving into your blood. That can have effects on its own (nitrogen can make you feel drunk, which is real dangerous while diving).

The big problem we have is lungs 😅
Air is compressible, so our lungs collapse under high pressure. Divers get around this by breathing high pressure gas (the pressure on the gas roughly equals the pressure from the water.

I can't say I know all the details of this, but the basic idea is that water is incompressible, and cells (and bodies in general) are full of water.

Besides hydrothermal vents, I know lots of ocean floor organisms are essentially detritivores, depending on "marine snow" (tiny bits of organic matter sinking from above), or whatever else falls down there (whale corpses!)
No idea if that stuff gets all the way to the bottom of deep trenches, though

We do know about hydrothermal vent ecosystems down at least to 5000m! They do chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis, which is fascinating.

Very weird. I kinda want to download the WIR dataset and see if there's anything in there that would help explain.

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My feelings on difficulty are very similar, but I don't think I could've described them this clearly. Thanks for sharing! Very insightful.

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