Hadal
The deepest point in the ocean lies 10,935 metres below the surface of the western Pacific. Scroll to go there.
Sunlight zone · 0–200 m
Almost everything alive in the sea runs on this light.
Nearly all of the ocean's photosynthesis happens in this thin, bright layer. Every metre you sink, a little more of the sun is gone.
Twilight zone · 200–1,000 m
Too dark to grow, still just light enough to see.
Animals here have enormous eyes, mirrored flanks or glass-clear bodies. Hiding is a way of life when the only light comes from above.
The largest migration on Earth happens every night.
Each evening, trillions of small fish, shrimp and squid swim up from these depths to feed near the surface, then sink back down before dawn.
Midnight zone · 1,000–4,000 m
No sunlight reaches past here.
From now on, the only light is made by living things.
Something is fishing.
A deep-sea anglerfish dangles a lure lit by bacteria that live inside it. Whatever swims toward the light becomes the meal.
One animal, longer than a blue whale.
A siphonophore is a colony of cloned bodies living as a single creature. Some stretch more than 40 metres, with light rippling down their whole length.
Three in four animals down here can make light.
When something grabs an Atolla jellyfish, it spins a pinwheel of blue light. It works like a burglar alarm, calling in bigger predators to eat the attacker.
Abyssal zone · 4,000–6,000 m
The abyssal plains.
Flat plains of fine sediment cover more of the planet than all the continents together. The water is barely above freezing, and it is completely dark.
A crewed submersible takes about four hours to reach the bottom.
Hadal zone · 6,000–10,935 m
Named for Hades.
Below 6,000 metres the ocean continues only inside trenches, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. Time to switch on the lamps.
The pressure keeps climbing, about one bar for every ten metres.
8,336 m · Izu-Ogasawara Trench
The deepest fish ever filmed.
In 2022 a camera lander recorded a small, pale snailfish at 8,336 metres. Somewhere not far below, scientists think, fish can no longer survive at all.
Challenger Deep · Mariana Trench
10,935 m
The water here presses down with more than a thousand times the pressure at the surface: over a tonne on every square centimetre. Far more people have been to space than have stood here.