Humanity seeks to explore space, while 70 percent of the surface of our planet remains unexplored. This is the area occupied by the World Ocean. Rather, there are four of them - Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Arctic, and they conceal no less mysteries than the notorious Mars or black holes …
Mountains and valleys
The oceanic relief is in no way inferior in its complexity to the land surface. At a depth of 3.5 to 6 kilometers there are plateaus, canyons and even mountains … The highest known seamount today is Mauna Kea in Hawaii, its height is 10,203 meters. Recall that the height of the same Everest is only 8848 meters.
There are also the deepest abysses, for example, the Challenger Abyss in the Mariana Trench, which is about 11 kilometers deep. By the way, the ocean is a real kingdom of darkness: sunlight penetrates into its depths only 75 meters. Not surprisingly, so far, scientists have managed to explore the ocean by only 2-5 percent.
Bahamas Atlantis
The legend of Atlantis also cannot be discounted. To date, more than 500 flooded settlements with the remains of buildings have been discovered in the ocean. Their age is from 3 to 10,000 years.
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Dr. Manson Valentine of the Natural Science Museum in Miami discovered hundreds of square and rectangular stone slabs at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the North Bimini region of the Bahamas, at a depth of 3 to 9 meters. In addition, there were roads and structures paved with huge slabs, representing several columns topped with a slab …
Some objects resembled ruined buildings, others - pyramids, others looked like circles of stones … With some imagination, you could see streets, fortress walls, a port with breakwaters on the seabed …
Initially, scientists assumed that the age of the finds is 12-14 thousand years, but analyzes have shown that they are approximately twice as old.
Rivers and waterfalls
Few people know that rivers flow at the bottom of the ocean. But they are not made of water. Methane, hydrogen sulfide and other gases seep through cracks in the relief. Mixing with seawater, they begin to move slowly … This effect is called "cold seepage".
There are also waterfalls under the water. So far there are seven of them. The largest one - more than 4 thousand meters high - hits the bottom of the Danish Strait.
True, underwater waterfalls function a little differently than those located on land. The difference in the level of temperature and salinity in different ocean areas, as well as the complex bottom topography with the presence of underwater slopes, contribute to the fact that denser water rushes to the bottom, and less dense water rises to the surface.
World of monsters
Charles Paxton of the University of St Andrews in Scotland has made the shocking assumption that the stories of giant sea monsters that pose a threat to people and ships sailing the ocean are not fiction at all. According to the scientist, several thousand architeutis squids can live in the ocean depths, the body length of which ranges from 20 to 23 meters. Paxton published the results of his research in the reputable scientific journal Journal of Zoology.
The world's oceans are home to about 250,000 known species of fauna. About a million more species have not yet been discovered. So, at the beginning of the last century, cross-finned fish, allegedly extinct 65 million years ago, were found there - they are also called coelacanths or coelacanths.
At great depths, blind fish live (why do they need sight in impenetrable darkness?) And creatures leading an almost immobile lifestyle in order to conserve energy.
At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, real "boiled crayfish" were found - shrimps that felt great living in hydrothermal springs at a temperature of +407 degrees Celsius! It turned out that, in addition to shrimp, bacteria, giant worms, crabs and shellfish also live there. On land, most of these creatures die already at temperatures above 40 degrees (bacteria - at plus 70 degrees).
Not so long ago, a creature recognized as the ugliest on the planet was discovered - a drop fish, or Psychrolutes marcidus. It consists of a gelatinous mass, the density of which is slightly less than that of water. The appearance of the drop fish quickly turned it into a popular Internet meme … It was probably made so ugly by living at a depth of 1200 meters, under conditions of tremendous pressure …
Marine gold
Did you know there is gold in the ocean? It contains tens of millions of tons of this noble metal, of the purest sample at that. But it's not very profitable to extract it from there: the cost of chemical methods for extracting metal from water is too high, it is even higher than the price of gold itself …