0 m · Sunlight Zone
200 m · Twilight Zone
1 000 m · Midnight Zone
4 000 m · Abyssal Zone
6 000 m · Hadal Zone
10 994 m · Challenger Deep
Recreational scuba limit
40 m
Past this depth, recreational diving becomes dangerous. Nitrogen narcosis starts to affect divers.
Blue whale
100 m · regular dive
The largest animal ever to have lived on Earth. Up to 30 m long and 200 tons. They feed on krill in the upper ocean.
Emperor penguin dive
214 m
The deepest dive ever recorded for a bird. They can hold their breath for over 20 minutes.
Great white shark
250 m · typical hunting depth
One of the ocean's apex predators. They've been tracked diving as deep as 1 200 m.
Deepest scuba dive ever
332 m · Ahmed Gabr, 2014
It took 12 minutes to descend and almost 14 hours to safely surface — to avoid the bends.
Leatherback sea turtle
535 m
The deepest-diving turtle. They follow jellyfish blooms into the cold and the dark.
Ocean sunfish (Mola mola)
600 m
The heaviest known bony fish. It spends most of the day diving up and down between the surface and deep cold layers.
Burj Khalifa, upside-down
830 m
The tallest building on Earth would already be fully submerged from this depth.
Frilled shark
1 000 m
A "living fossil" with an eel-like body and 300 needle teeth — almost unchanged for 80 million years.
Sperm whale
1 280 m · hunting dive
Sperm whales dive into the dark to hunt giant squid, holding their breath for over 90 minutes.
Vampire squid
1 500 m
"Vampire squid from hell." Despite the name it's gentle — and feeds on marine snow drifting from above, not blood.
Giant squid
2 000 m
Up to 13 m long, with eyes the size of dinner plates — the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. Rarely seen alive.
Anglerfish
2 250 m
The glowing lure on its head attracts prey in total darkness. Only the females hunt — the tiny males fuse onto them for life.
No sunlight, no plants
3 000 m
Below here, the entire food web depends on snowfall — particles of dead matter drifting down from above.
RMS Titanic
3 800 m · resting place
The Titanic has been lying broken in two on the seafloor of the North Atlantic since April 15, 1912.
Dumbo octopus
4 500 m
Named for the ear-like fins on its head. The deepest-living octopus, gliding above the abyssal plain.
The Hadal Zone begins
6 000 m
Named after Hades. Below this point lie only deep ocean trenches — the least explored places on Earth.
Mariana snailfish
8 178 m
The deepest-living fish ever filmed. Pale, gelatinous, and somehow thriving in crushing darkness 800× the surface pressure.
Deepsea Challenger
10 898 m · James Cameron, 2012
Solo descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a lime-green submersible. The descent took 2.5 hours.
Challenger Deep
10 994 m · the bottom
The deepest known point of the ocean. The pressure here is over 1 000 times that at the surface.