An interactive exhibition
Below
the Surface
Explore the ocean by depth.
Start the descent11,000 metres in one scroll · fully reversible
Sunlight
0 – 200 m
The only floor of the ocean with a ceiling of light. In the top two hundred metres, red is swallowed within the first dozen metres, green soon after — the sea returns blue and keeps everything else.
- LightBright — photosynthesis happens here
- Water~20–25 °C in the tropics
- Pressure1 – 21 atm
Red wavelengths are almost fully absorbed within the first 10–20 m. This thin sunlit skin powers nearly the entire ocean food web — everything below is waiting for what sinks from here.
Twilight
200 – 1,000 m
Sunlight gives out gradually, like a memory of the surface. Every evening, billions of animals climb from these depths toward the surface to feed and sink again before dawn — the largest migration of animals on Earth, and it happens every single day.
- LightFaint blue, then effectively none
- Water~15 → 4 °C (the thermocline)
- Pressure21 – 101 atm
Animals here must manufacture their own light to be seen, or bend their bodies into mirrors so they are not.
Midnight
1,000 – 4,000 m
Past one thousand metres, no photon from the sun has ever arrived. The only light left is the light animals make themselves: lures, flares, decoys, silent blue-green signals. Food arrives as snow — a slow, constant fall of what the surface could not finish.
- LightNone from the sun — bioluminescence only
- Water~4 °C
- Pressure101 – 401 atm
Surveys of deep-sea organisms have found roughly three-quarters capable of bioluminescence (Martini & Haddock, 2017).
Abyss
4,000 – 6,000 m
Four kilometres down, the water is a degree or two above freezing and has not touched the sky in centuries. The seafloor below is the single largest habitat on Earth — a soft grey prairie of sediment covering more than half the planet's surface.
- LightNone
- Water~2 °C
- Pressure401 – 601 atm
Life is patient here: sea cucumbers herd across the mud in the thousands, grazing whatever settles.
Hadal
6,000 – 11,000 m
Named for Hades. Below six thousand metres the open ocean floor ends and the trenches begin — narrow scars along subduction zones, where one tectonic plate grinds beneath another. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, over a tonne presses on every square centimetre.
- LightNone
- Water~1–2 °C
- Pressure601 – 1,101 atm
Fieldwork at 10,900 m
Your headlamp is the first light this floor has ever seen. Move the beam — mouse, finger, or arrow keys — and find what lives on the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
Sightings log
Fish have been recorded to ~8,336 m; below ~8,400 m the chemistry of their cells appears to set the limit. The deepest surveyed point of the ocean, Challenger Deep, lies at ≈10,935 m (NOAA).
Surfacing log
Five zones, one ocean
11,000 m back to sea level — hold on to your mask.
Sources
Figures on this page are published approximations — no live sensor data, no invented findings. Depth–scroll mapping is non-linear so that every zone gets a fair share of the descent.