An Atlas of the Unseen — Vertical 10,994 m

FATHOM

How deep can you gobefore the light gives out?

11°22′N 142°35′E
Challenger Deep · Pacific
Scroll to dive

Epipelagic · 0 – 200 m

The SunlightZone

For the first two hundred metres, the sea still remembers the sun.

This is the only layer the light truly reaches — the thin, bright skin of a planet that is mostly dark water. Below it, everything we are about to meet has never seen a single day.

Shafts of sunlight filtering through the upper ocean

Light penetration0 – 200 M

Mesopelagic · 200 – 1,000 m

The TwilightZone

Colour leaves first. Then warmth. Then the sun — somewhere above a thousand metres — simply stops.

Past this point almost every living thing makes its own light. Drag, or keep scrolling.Keep scrolling — the deep goes on.

Crown jellyfishSPEC. 02·A

Depth≈ 700 m Lightbioluminescent rim Span30 cm

A comb jelly refracting iridescent light

Comb jellySPEC. 02·B

Depth≈ 850 m Lightrefractive cilia Motioneight beating rows

An unidentified gelatinous deep-sea organism

UnidentifiedSPEC. 02·C

Depth≈ 980 m Lightsoft aqua glow Cataloguedno

Most species down here have never been named.

The twilight zone may hold the greatest mass of fish anywhere on the planet — and we have described only a fraction of what lives in it.

02 · DRAG TO TRAVERSE · 200 – 1,000 M

Mesopelagic

A single bioluminescent jellyfish alone in the black void

03 · Bathypelagic · 1,000 – 4,000 m

MID
NIGHT

Below a thousand metres there is no sunlight at all — only the light that living things choose to make. It is the largest habitat on Earth, and we have seen almost none of it.

A single bioluminescent lure glowing in total darkness

Anglerfish · lure≈ 2,400 M

Down here, a single point of light is enough to hunt by — or to be hunted.

Bioluminescence is the common language of the deep: a lure, a warning, a mate's signal, a decoy. In the largest dark on the planet, light is never wasted.

Abyssopelagic · 4,000 – 6,000 m

The Abyss

Cold. Black. Crushing. And — against every expectation — alive.

0Pressure at the floor — roughly eight tonnes on every square inch.

0The temperature, near-constant, in perpetual dark.

0Of the sea floor still unmapped in any real detail.

A ghostly translucent fish at the bottom of the trench

05 · Hadal · 6,000 – 10,994 m

The bottomof the world

0m The single deepest point on Earth — the floor of the Challenger Deep.

Named for Hades. Down here the trench lies further below the waves than Everest stands above them — permanent night, a pressure that would fold a submarine like paper, and pale, patient creatures drifting on regardless.

Resurfacing

We have better mapsof the surface of Marsthan of our own ocean floor.

Resurface — return to 0 m