Lanternfish ハダカイワシ
Myctophidae
Possibly the most numerous vertebrates on Earth. Each species has its own pattern of photophores, like a name written in light.
Dive log 00 — Leaving the surface
Descend where light gives up.
Ninety percent of the ocean lives in darkness. Scroll to sink through five zones, from warm blue water to the floor of the Challenger Deep, 10,935 metres down. The gauge on the right keeps count.
Scroll to dive
陽光
EPIPELAGIC · 0 – 200 m
The thin bright skin of the sea.
Almost all ocean life you have ever seen lives here. Enough light reaches this band for phytoplankton to photosynthesise, and those drifting cells produce roughly half of the oxygen on Earth.
By 200 metres, only about one percent of surface light remains. Red disappears first, then orange and yellow, until only blue is left.
~50%Of Earth's oxygen
10mWhere red light fades
21atmPressure at 200 m
薄明
MESOPELAGIC · 200 – 1,000 m
Blue dusk that never finishes falling.
Every night, billions of animals rise from here to feed near the surface, then sink again before dawn. It is the largest migration on the planet, and it happens every twenty-four hours.
Many residents carry rows of light organs on their bellies. They glow to match the faint light from above, erasing their own silhouettes.
Move your cursor into the school.
Barreleye デメニギス
Macropinna microstoma
A transparent, fluid-filled head with tubular green eyes inside it that rotate to look straight up for prey.
Firefly squid ホタルイカ
Watasenia scintillans
Every spring they rise into Toyama Bay by the millions and turn the shoreline electric blue.
漆黒
BATHYPELAGIC · 1,000 – 4,000 m
No sunlight. Only what the animals make.
Below a kilometre, the sun is gone for good. The water holds steady near 4 °C, and the only light comes from living things: lures, flashes, clouds of glowing ink.
Food is scarce, so bodies here are built to wait. Big mouths, soft muscles, and slow metabolisms suit a place where a meal may come once a month.
Move your cursor near the glowing lure. Linger and it bites.
Anglerfish チョウチンアンコウ
Melanocetus johnsonii
The lure is a pocket of glowing bacteria. Males are tiny and some species fuse permanently to the female.
Vampire squid コウモリダコ
Vampyroteuthis infernalis
Despite the name it eats marine snow, catching falling debris on sticky filaments and rolling it into pellets.
Gulper eel フクロウナギ
Eurypharynx pelecanoides
A jaw so loose it can swallow animals larger than itself. The tail tip glows pink.
深淵
ABYSSOPELAGIC · 4,000 – 6,000 m
A plain of silt, wider than all the continents.
The abyssal plains cover more than half of the planet's surface. They are flat, cold and quiet, dusted with the remains of everything that ever lived above.
That steady fall of debris is called marine snow. The flecks drifting across this page are a rough picture of it.
The seabed only shows where your light falls.
~2°CWater temperature
501atmPressure at 5,000 m
>50%Of Earth's surface
weeksFor snow to reach the floor
冥府
HADAL · 6,000 – 10,935 m
The trenches, named for the underworld.
Hadal comes from Hades. These are the ocean trenches, long gashes where one tectonic plate dives under another. The deepest point on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits here.
At the bottom the water pushes down with over a thousand atmospheres. Life persists anyway: amphipods, sea cucumbers, and pale snailfish that hold the record for the deepest fish ever filmed.
Down here your cursor is the only light.
Hadal snailfish シンカイクサウオ
Pseudoliparis belyaevi
Filmed at 8,336 m in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench in 2022. Their bones are only partly hardened, keeping them flexible under pressure.
Supergiant amphipod ダイダラボッチ
Alicella gigantea
A crustacean relative of the sand hopper that can reach 34 cm, scavenging whatever sinks into the trench.
Xenophyophore クセノフィオフォア
Syringammina fragilissima
A single cell the size of a fist, building a fragile shell out of the sediment around it.
Record of descents
Who has been all the way down.
- 1960TriesteJacques Piccard and Don Walsh reach the floor of the Challenger Deep in a bathyscaphe. They stay twenty minutes and see almost nothing through the stirred-up silt.10,916 m
- 2012Deepsea ChallengerJames Cameron makes the first solo dive, spending about three hours on the bottom collecting samples and footage.10,908 m
- 2019Limiting FactorVictor Vescovo's Five Deeps expedition reaches the deepest point of all five oceans and starts making repeat trench dives routine.10,925 m
- 2020Fendouzhe 奋斗者China's crewed submersible reaches the Challenger Deep and broadcasts live video from the trench floor.10,909 m