Believe it or not, we’re at the AVERAGE ocean depth. The Cuvier’s beaked whale is the deepest diving mammal at 3000 meters (10,000 ft), and the Titanic’s final resting place is about 800 meters down from that. The “colossal squid” isn’t just a myth, though they are incredibly rare - and with such low light in this zone, have developed the largest eyes of any creature in existence (27cm / 10.6 in). just the occasional anglerfish or blobfish vying for the top prize in the beauty contest. * Enter “The Midnight Zone” (1000-4000m / 3300-13000 ft): No sunlight, and therefore no plants. For comparison, certain crabs and octopi can be found around there, and even leatherback sea turtles can dive up to the 1000-meter mark. (We’ll cover them in a later episode.) The deepest human scuba dive comes in at a mere 332 meters (1090 ft), and many military submarines max out around double that depth. This is where you start to lose light, and where certain species have developed bioluminescence to help see in the dark. Great Whites, swordfish, even some Emperor penguins have been discovered diving to about the 500-meter mark. Sharks, dolphins, whales, even jellies are usually within that zone - but it’s by no means a cutoff point. That’s where you’re most likely to still have sunlight penetrating through the water - good news for plankton and algae, which produce a good half of our atmosphere’s oxygen. * The vast majority of marine life lives in the “euphotic zone” - basically from the surface to 200 meters (~650 ft) deep. Hermann von Helmholtz was a German physician who made basic advances in physiology and physics.Space may be the final frontier, but there is so much unexplored territory beneath the waves on the ocean! Let’s take a dive into how deep the ocean really is. In the 19th century, Lord Kelvin was a Scottish physicist who pioneered the mathematical analysis of electricity and the laws of thermodynamics. The celebrated namesakes of the breaking wave suggest its fundamental nature. Thus, the distant whorls of a spiral galaxy and the familiar ones of a chambered nautilus obey the same physical laws and exhibit the same pinwheel shape. It was an enormous leap of faith, and it proved enormously correct. In the universe, he wrote, every massive particle attracts every other massive particle. Thus, Newton envisioned his law of gravitation as acting across all space. They assumed the laws of nature were universal and acted the same everywhere, whether on Earth or far beyond the Moon. The heavens were perfect, immutable and incorruptible, while the terrestrial realm was erratic, imperfect and changeable.Įarly scientists defied that demarcation. The medieval world saw the cosmos as divided into irreconcilable parts. The discovery throws new light on the ubiquity of Kelvin-Helmholtz billows in nature and, as a happy byproduct, the universality of natural law - a founding assumption of modern science. Their typical wavelength was 75 meters, or about 250 feet, and they moved very slowly, one passing about every 50 seconds. 6, in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, the scientists reported how a network of temperature sensors that they moored at a depth of a half kilometer, or a third of a mile, gave strong evidence of the passing waves. In a first, scientists from the Netherlands and France found the breaking waves rippling down the sides of an underwater mountain in the Atlantic some 700 miles south of the Azores. In their early stages, the waves produce the kind of slopes that surfers dream about. At the boundary, the interaction produces a sequence of crests that rise gently and then curl into chaotic turbulence. They originate when two fluids, or gases, (or sea and air), move past one another at different speeds. Scientists have long tracked these distinctive waves, finding them on the windblown sea, on sand dunes, among clouds and even in the churning gases of Saturn and Jupiter. The deep waves have the distinguishing curl of Kelvin-Helmholtz billows, a type of wave present throughout nature. The discovery also illustrates the radical nature of the insights that lay behind the start of the scientific revolution some four centuries ago. The finding reveals the presence of a subtle new force that can stir the dark seabed, and it helps to explain some of the nuances of planetary recycling and the provision of food to abyssal life. Scientists exploring the deep sea have discovered a distinctive kind of breaking wave.
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