Wikiseum

You are standing by the sea. What you see is only the surface of an enormous world. As we go deeper, the sunlight fades. Yet life does not stop. Travel past coral, plankton, glowing animals and hot springs on the ocean floor.

7 stops · about 12 minutes · explore freely

  1. Stop 1 of 70 mOne great oceanOceanAll seas are connected and together cover more than seventy percent of the Earth. Look at the map to see how the oceans flow into one another without a border.
  2. Stop 2 of 720 mLife in the lightCoral reefCoral reefs lie in shallow, sunny water and cover only a fraction of the seabed, yet a large share of all sea creatures lives there. Find three different forms of life in the photos.
  3. Stop 3 of 7100 mSmall but essentialPlanktonPlankton drifts with the currents and stands at the start of almost every food chain in the sea. Plant plankton also makes a large part of the oxygen on Earth.
  4. Stop 4 of 7600 mWhere the light fadesPelagic zoneBiologists divide the open sea into layers. Below about two hundred metres the light is too weak for photosynthesis, and at around a thousand metres it becomes completely dark.
  5. Stop 5 of 71,000 mLight of their ownBioluminescenceIn the dark, many animals make their own light: to lure prey, to find each other or to hide. In the deep sea it is the rule rather than the exception.
  6. Stop 6 of 72,500 mLife without the sunHydrothermal ventAt hydrothermal vents, hot, mineral-rich water streams out of the seabed. Bacteria draw energy from chemicals there instead of sunlight, and so carry whole communities of animals.
  7. Stop 7 of 710,935 mThe deepest pointChallenger DeepChallenger Deep lies almost eleven kilometres below the surface; the first people reached the bottom only in 1960. By now we also know that our waste reaches this far.