Dark Sea Floor

But despite their name these plains are not uniformly flat.

Dark sea floor. About the 300 million square kilometers of ocean floor we actually still know very little. Altogether the deep sea floor makes up about 71 of the world s oceans with shallow waters such as continental shelves making up 29. The reason the ocean is blue is due to the absorption and scattering of light. Over 75 of the ocean floor lies can be found within this zone with the continental rise starting here.

Nearly half of the world s sea floors are over 3 000 meters 9 800 ft deep. Pure water is perfectly clear of course but if there is a lot of water and the water is very deep so that there are no reflections off the sea floor the water appears as a very dark navy blue. For a long time it was thought that it was too dark and too cold for living things on the ocean floor. Imago images aurora photos the deep sea is still largely unexplored.

For most of the world s oceans your answer would be correct. Deep sea creatures photos adaptation is the name of the game when you live thousands of feet below the water s surface. In most of the world the ocean floor is very deep averaging 3 790 meters 12 430 ft in depth. Deep sea exploration has revealed varied landscapes which include volcanoes seamounts hydrothermal vents and cold seeps.

See how these deep sea denizens make the most of their deep dark home. However scientists have. The mid atlantic ridge for instance separates the north american plate from the eurasian plate and the south american plate from the african plate the east pacific rise is a mid ocean ridge that runs through the eastern pacific ocean and separates the pacific plate from the north american. At depths of over 10 000 feet and covering 70 of the ocean floor abyssal plains are the largest habitat on earth.

Running through all the world s oceans is a continuous mountain range called the mid ocean ridge submarine ridge in figure 14 23. In fact there have been more missions into space than journeys down to the greatest depths of the oceans. This layer is also called the midnight or the dark zone. The smooth flat regions that make up 40 of the ocean floor are the abyssal plain.

Sunlight does not penetrate to the sea floor making these deep dark ecosystems less productive than those along the continental shelf. Bathypelagic zone midnight zone the bathypelagic layer is found between 3 281 feet and 12 124 feet just above the abyss.