Which sea contains Weber Deep, a 7,351-meter deep point?

Weber Deep, a 7,351-meter-deep point, lies in the Banda Sea. It is the deepest part of this Indonesian sea and one of the deepest places in any marginal sea.

Unlike many famous deep points, Weber Deep is not a conventional oceanic trench. It is a forearc basin associated with the complex plate-tectonic structure of the Banda Arc, where crustal blocks and subduction have shaped the seafloor. The basin extends for roughly 450 kilometers and lies near the Maluku Islands.

The feature is named for Max Carl Wilhelm Weber, a Dutch-German zoologist who led the Siboga expedition. Its depth was identified more precisely during the 1929–1930 Snellius Expedition, whose ship used echo sounding to map the Banda Sea. A later Galathea expedition investigated the deep more closely and found unusual deep-sea organisms.

A common mix-up is confusing Weber Deep with a trench. The Banda Sea is also tectonically active: its surrounding faults, volcanoes and subduction zones have produced major earthquakes and tsunamis. The Tasman, Sulu and Coral seas are all different basins and do not contain Weber Deep.