Interesting Facts About The Ocean Floor

Man has been searching for wonders that lay on the ocean floor for centuries.

Interesting facts about the ocean floor.

This graphic shows several ocean floor features on a scale from 0 35 000 feet below sea level. The world s oceans cover more than 71 percent of the earth s surface but people have only explored about five percent of it. Cousteau submerged his camera to the sea floor of the romanche trench in the atlantic ocean some 24 500 feet down providing the first glimpse of this previously unseen part of the ocean. There are many amazing and fun facts about the ocean floor you may not know.

Here are 15 crazy facts about the ocean floor. There are trenches mountains volcanos and lakes and rivers. Not only does a large part of the planet exist beneath the ocean so does the united states around 50 per cent in fact. Because the water around these depressions contains more salt than normal seawater it s denser and sinks into the depressions creating.

The ocean is like an entirely separate world. Three quarters of this planet is covered by water bodies with the biggests ones being the five oceans the atlantic pacific southern indian and arctic oceans. In fact the oceans hold about 96 5 of all water on earth. The largest ocean on earth is the pacific ocean covering around 30 of the earth s surface.

The research ship directs sound waves at the bottom and charts the echoes that bounce back to create a detailed map. Continental shelf 300 feet continental slope 300 10 000 feet abyssal plain 10 000 feet abyssal hill 3 000 feet up from the abyssal plain seamount 6 000 feet. Around 70 of the planet s surface is covered by oceans. Around 50 per cent of the us lies beneath the ocean.

Sonar has revealed features such as seamounts submerged volcanic peaks which rise 1 000 m 3 300 ft from the sea floor and guyots flat topped seamounts. We know very little about the deep ocean floor and the life it holds due to the depth and the difficulties this creates for scientists. The mariana trench the world s deepest submarine de pression is more than 11 000m below sea level in some parts about 7 000m below the mean depth of the ocean floor. The pacific ocean is the world s largest ocean and contains around 25 000 islands.

With 25 000 islands lying within it the pacific ocean has more islands than anywhere else on the planet. Take a deep breath gang as we dive into our ocean facts top ten ocean facts. The following features are shown at example depths to scale though each feature has a considerable range at which it may occur. Oceanographers use sonar to map the ocean floor.

In fact it has been said that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the deeper ocean trenches. The trenches around the edges of the eastern pacific ocean are shallower than are those of the western pacific.