King's Trough even an oblique meteor impact. The trough, being in an apparently geologically stable region, has been studied as a possible location for radioactive waste disposal. King's Trough King's Trough is an undersea trough in the Atlantic Ocean. It is located on the east side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, northwest of the Açores-Biscay rise and roughly 400 km NNE of the Azores. It is about 400 km long, running in a NW–SE direction. To the east it branches into the Peake Deep and Freen Deep. The center depth is 4500 m. Surrounding the trough are high ridges and seamounts, such as
Nankai Trough with the subducting young, hot Philippine Sea tectonic plate. At the targeted site, the geothermal gradient is about four times steeper than elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Reaching temperatures of approximately 130 °C in other areas would require collecting cores from approximately 4 kilometers below the seafloor, rather than 1.2 kilometers as planned. The Nankai Trough is the near-surface extension of a zone of active seismicity that dips beneath SW Japan. The rupture zone has been subdivided into five areas with respect to seismic modelling (Mitsui et al., 2004). These five subdivisions show interesting differences in earthquake behavior: frequency of