An interactive exhibition · 0–10,935 m
This page is the descent. Scroll down and the water darkens around you, the pressure climbs, and daylight fades to a darkness lit only by living things — all the way to the floor of the Challenger Deep. Native scrolling, fully reversible: scroll up to surface.
Zone 01 · Epipelagic
0–200 m
The sunlit skin of the sea. Enough light penetrates this thin lid for plants to grow, so nearly everything the ocean is famous for — reefs, turtles, sharks, whales — crowds into it. Yet below about 200 m, only 1 % of surface light remains, and the lit ocean stops.
Specimen 01 · Reptile
Dermochelys coriacea
The deepest-diving reptile on Earth. Where other sea turtles carry domed shells of bone, the leatherback wears a leathery, ridged carapace over a mesh of tiny ossicles — pressure-tolerant, and warm-blooded enough to forage in near-freezing water.
Specimen 02 · Fish · filter feeder
Rhincodon typus
The largest fish in the sea — and one of the gentlest. A whale shark the length of a city bus feeds on some of the smallest life in it, filtering plankton through modified gill rakers. Each animal’s spot pattern is unique, letting researchers count them from photographs.
Zone 02 · Mesopelagic
200–1,000 m
Sunlight thins to a blue gloom and dies at 1,000 m. This is the twilight belt of the diel vertical migration — the largest animal movement on the planet: every night, billions of lanternfish, squid and crustaceans rise hundreds of metres to feed in richer water, and sink back before dawn.
Specimen 03 · Fish · vertical migrator
Myctophum punctatum
A finger-length fish that runs the ocean’s biggest commute. Lanternfish are so abundant that their nightly migrations reflect sonar, mapping on ship instruments as a false “seafloor” — the deep scattering layer. Rows of photophores light their bellies to match faint light from above, erasing their own shadows.
Specimen 04 · Cephalopod · relict
Vampyroteuthis infernalis
Neither vampire nor squid — a living fossil in a class of one. It haunts oxygen-minimum zones where predators cannot follow, living on a metabolism so slow it breathes, hunts and ages at half speed. Cornered, it folds its spiny webbed arms over its head like a cloak and ejects a cloud of glowing mucus.
Specimen 05 · Cephalopod · giant
Architeuthis dux
The animal that made sailors believe in sea monsters. Eight arms and two extensible feeding tentacles club prey with hooks and suckers; its eyes — the largest in the animal kingdom at ≈27 cm across — are built to catch the silhouette of a hunting sperm whale in the dark. First photographed alive only in 2004.
Zone 03 · Bathypelagic
1,000–4,000 m
No sunlight reaches here — ever. The only light is made by life: lures, flashes, glowing mucus, luminous bellies. Water is a few degrees above freezing, the pressure passes one hundred atmospheres, and food arrives as a slow, steady snowfall from the waters above. Nearly everything that lives here makes its own light, or waits for something that does.
Specimen 06 · Fish · lure angler
Melanocetus johnsonii
A trap with a fish attached. The female hangs in the black, glowing a single light: a lure packed with symbiotic bacteria. Whatever swims to it meets a net of needle teeth on a hinge, and a stomach that stretches around prey longer than the anglerfish itself. The male is a fraction of her size — in many deep-sea anglers he fuses to her body permanently.
Specimen 07 · Fish · gulper
Eurypharynx pelecanoides
A net for a face. The pelican eel’s pouch-like lower jaw balloons around whatever drifts past — crustaceans, squid, sinking snow — while a luminous organ at the tip of its whip-tail may draw prey close in the dark. It is nearly all mouth and tail, swimming on a whisper of energy.
Zone 04 · Abyssopelagic
4,000–6,000 m
The abyssal plains: the flattest, least-explored landscapes on Earth, swept by currents older than continents and fed only by a drizzle of marine snow. Nearly freezing, always black, under a pressure of four to six hundred atmospheres. Life here is patient — it stands still, faces the current, and waits for the sky to feed it.
Specimen 08 · Octopod · cirrate
Grimpoteuthis spp.
The deepest-living of all octopods — one was observed at 6,957 m in the Java Trench in 2020. Where most octopus jet, Grimpoteuthis flaps a pair of ear-like fins and draws its webbed arms into a slow bell, trading speed for calories. Its gelatinous body carries almost nothing it cannot afford to carry.
Specimen 09 · Sea cucumber · deposit feeder
Scotoplanes globosa
Not a plant, not a pig: a sea cucumber that herds the abyssal plain in dozens, hoovering the freshest marine snow from the mud. Its tube feet are hydraulic water-balloons, inflated by pumping seawater through its body; swollen and deflated, they march it step by patient step into the current.
Zone 05 · Hadalpelagic
6,000–10,935 m
Named for Hades. The hadal zone exists only in trenches — scars where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. Below 6,000 m the open water ends and the walls close in; at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, 10,935 m down, the pressure passes a thousand atmospheres and the temperature sits at 1–2 °C. Life persists even here: soft, slow, and entirely unbothered by the dark.
Specimen 10 · Fish · hadal endemic
Pseudoliparis swirei
The deepest fish ever collected, described in 2018 from the Mariana Trench. It carries no swim bladder and barely any skeleton — under 800 atmospheres the cheapest strategy is to be almost entirely water, gelatinous and translucent. In 2023 a related Pseudoliparis was filmed at 8,336 m in the Izu–Ogasawara Trench: the deepest fish ever observed.
Specimen 11 · Crustacean · scavenger
Hirondellea gigas
The owner of the deepest address in the ocean. This amphipod, a few centimetres long, swarms any bait that reaches the floor of the Challenger Deep within hours. Researchers reported in 2019 that it protects itself from the toxic metals of trench sediment with a gel of aluminium hydroxide — armour grown from the mud itself.
You are at the floor of the Challenger Deep, 10,935 m down. Switch on the research light and sweep it across the trench floor to find what lives here.
Research light · Challenger Deep floor
Move the light — mouse, touch, or ←↑↓→
beam 50% · 42%
Full descent · 10,935 m
Specimen
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drag to rotate · ←→
One shared scale — faint gridlines mark every metre. Diver: 1.8 m. DSV Alvin: ≈7 m, crewed, rated to 6,500 m (WHOI). Sizes are representative maxima from the cited sources.