The Deep Ocean: Earth’s Largest and Least Known World
More than sixty percent of Earth’s surface lies beneath deep ocean waters, yet this vast realm remains largely invisible to human knowledge. While satellites map continents in exquisite detail and space probes photograph distant planets, the seafloor beneath our own oceans is still mostly unknown. Scientists estimate that humans have directly observed only about 0.001 percent of the deep ocean floor. That figure is not a typo. It is a reminder that the largest environment on Earth remains, in practical terms, unexplored.
The deep ocean begins where sunlight fades, typically below 200 meters, and extends down to depths exceeding 11,000 meters in places like the Mariana Trench. It is a world of crushing pressure, perpetual darkness, near-freezing temperatures, and immense scale. These condi...
