How deep can you go?
Scroll straight down from the surface to the bottom of the deepest trench on Earth — and meet what lives at every depth.
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Sunlight Zone
The Surface
Almost all the life you've ever seen lives in this thin, bright top layer of the ocean.
Sunlight Zone
Red light is already gone
Water swallows red light in the first 10 metres. It's why everything below here looks blue.
Sunlight Zone
Sea turtle
Sea turtles can hold their breath for hours, slowing their heart to a few beats per minute.
Sunlight Zone
40 m — Scuba limit
The recreational scuba limit. By now orange light is gone too. Deeper needs special gas mixes.
Sunlight Zone
Moon jellyfish
Jellyfish have drifted the oceans for over 500 million years — long before the dinosaurs.
How deep each colour reaches
100 m
Sunlight Zone
Where the colours go
Only about 1% of sunlight is left here. Red, orange and yellow are gone — only blue gets deeper.
Twilight Zone
Photosynthesis ends here
Below 200 m there's too little light for plants. Only a dim blue glow remains, and it's fading fast.
Twilight Zone
214 m — One breath
The deepest no-limit freedive ever: Herbert Nitsch, 2007 — on a single lungful of air.
Twilight Zone
Bristlemouth
This tiny fish is the most abundant vertebrate on Earth — there are trillions of them down here.
Twilight Zone
The biggest commute on Earth
Every night, billions of these fish rise to feed and sink again by dawn — the largest migration on the planet, and it happens daily.
Twilight Zone
332 m — The limit of the lungs
Deepest scuba dive on record: Ahmed Gabr, 2014. 15 minutes down — and 15 hours back up.
Twilight Zone
Marine snow
A constant 'snow' of dead plankton and waste drifts down forever. Down here, it's the bottom of the food chain.
Twilight Zone
Swordfish
Swordfish heat their eyes and brain to stay sharp while hunting in the cold, dark twilight.
Twilight Zone
Vampire squid
It lives in the oxygen-minimum zone on almost no oxygen at all, eating nothing but marine snow.
Twilight Zone
Barreleye
Its head is completely transparent, and its glowing green eyes rotate to look up through its own skull.
Twilight Zone
Coelacanth
A 'living fossil' thought to have died with the dinosaurs — until a live one turned up in 1938.
Twilight Zone
Past the Burj Khalifa
You've now sunk further than the height of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth.
make their own light
Twilight Zone
Most life here glows
About 76% of the animals down here make their own light — to lure prey, find mates, or vanish.
Midnight Zone
No sunlight, ever
No sunlight has ever reached this deep. From here to the bottom, the only light in the ocean is alive.
surface pressure
A foam cup sent down comes back this small.
Midnight Zone
The crush
Pressure here is already about 100× the surface. Divers send foam cups down for fun — they come back shrunk to a thimble.
Midnight Zone
Anglerfish
Her glowing lure is a pouch of living bacteria. The tiny male bites on and fuses to her body forever.
Midnight Zone
Gulper eel
Its mouth is bigger than the rest of its body — built to swallow rare meals whole in a place with little food.
Midnight Zone
Giant squid
It has some of the largest eyes of any animal — about 27 cm across, the size of a basketball.
Midnight Zone
Greenland shark
The longest-living animal with a backbone. Some sharks alive today were born around 400 years ago.
Midnight Zone
Sperm whale
Sperm whales dive this deep on a single breath, hunting squid in total darkness by sound for up to 90 minutes.
Midnight Zone
Black smokers
Water hotter than 400 °C erupts from the seabed here. Around it, life thrives on chemicals — fed by the Earth, not the Sun.
Midnight Zone
Colossal squid
It has the largest eyes of any animal that has ever lived — each one the size of a dinner plate.
Midnight Zone
2,992 m — Deepest of any mammal
A Cuvier's beaked whale once dived here and held its breath for 2 hours and 17 minutes.
How deep can we really go?
↓ you are at 3,200 m
Midnight Zone
How deep can we really go?
Freediver 214 m · scuba 332 m · sperm whale 2,250 m · Matsya 6,000 m · deepest fish 8,336 m · the bottom 10,935 m.
Midnight Zone
3,682 m — The average ocean
The average depth of the entire world ocean is right about here. And we're still not even halfway down.
Midnight Zone
3,800 m — The Titanic
The RMS Titanic rests here in permanent, freezing darkness, slowly being eaten by deep-sea bacteria.
Midnight Zone
Whale fall
When a whale dies and sinks, its body becomes an oasis — feeding an entire ecosystem on the seabed for decades.
Abyssal Zone
The Abyss
Near-freezing, pitch black, and crushing. Most of the planet's seabed lies down here, almost entirely unexplored.
Abyssal Zone
Giant isopod
A scavenger like a pill-bug the size of a cat. It can survive years between meals on the empty abyssal floor.
Abyssal Zone
One cold, dark room
It's been about 2–4 °C since 1,000 m down. The whole deep ocean is essentially a single freezing, lightless room.
Abyssal Zone
The internet's floor
Roughly 99% of the world's internet — every message, call and video — crosses the seabed in cables like these.
Abyssal Zone
Sea cucumber
Soft, slow and strange, it's the most common large animal on the abyssal floor — the deep sea's vacuum cleaner.
Hadal Zone
6,000 m — Matsya 6000
India's first crewed deep-sea sub, Matsya 6000, aims to carry three people to this depth (NIOT, Samudrayaan).
Hadal Zone
6,895 m — The deepest wreck
The USS Samuel B. Roberts, a WWII destroyer lost in 1944, was found here in 2022 — the deepest shipwreck ever located.
Hadal Zone
6,957 m — Deepest octopus
The deepest octopus ever filmed — a Dumbo octopus, right here in the Indian Ocean's Java Trench.
Hadal Zone
7,290 m — The Java Trench
The deepest point of the Indian Ocean. You're now in the Hadal Zone, named after Hades, god of the underworld.
Hadal Zone
8,336 m — The deepest fish
A snailfish was filmed here, the deepest fish ever seen. Below about this depth, no fish can survive — their cells fail.
Hadal Zone
8,849 m — A whole Everest
You've now descended the full height of Mount Everest, upside down. And there's still more below.
Hadal Zone
We got here first
Humans have barely visited the deepest trenches — yet a plastic bag was already filmed drifting near the very bottom.
Hadal Zone
10,935 m — The bottom of the world
Challenger Deep. Pressure is ~8 tons per square inch. First reached in 1960 — the next humans didn't arrive for 52 years.