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Jun 5, 2023 · About 97 percent of Earth's water is in the ocean. The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the surface of our planet. It's hard to imagine, but about 97 percent of the Earth's water can be found in our ocean. Of the tiny percentage that's not in the ocean, about two percent is frozen up in glaciers and ice caps.
Mar 5, 2024 · The ocean covers 70 percent of Earth 's surface. It contains about 1.35 billion cubic kilometers (324 million cubic miles) of water, which is about 97 percent of all the water on Earth. The ocean makes all life on Earth possible, and makes the planet appear blue when viewed from space.
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Although the ocean is one continuous body of water, oceanographers have divided it into four principal areas: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. The Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans merge into icy waters around Antarctica. Some oceanographers define this as a fifth ocean, most commonly called the Southern Ocean.
Climate The atmosphere receives much of its heat from the ocean. As the sun warms the water, the ocean transfers heat to the atmosphere. In turn, the atmosphere distributes the heat around the globe. Because water absorbs and loses heat more slowly than land masses, the ocean helps balance global temperatures by absorbing heat in the summer and rel...
After the Earth began to form about 4.6 billion years ago, it gradually separated into layers of lighter and heavier rock. The lighter rock rose and formed the Earths crust. The heavier rock sank and formed the Earths core and mantle. The oceans water came from rocks inside the newly forming Earth. As the molten rocks cooled, they released water va...
Scientists began mapping the ocean floor in the 1920s. They used instruments called echo sounders, which measure water depths using sound waves. Echo sounders use sonar technology. Sonar is an acronym for SOund Navigation And Ranging. The sonar showed that the ocean floor has dramatic physical features, including huge mountains, deep canyons, steep...
The oceans crust is a thin layer of volcanic rock called basalt. The ocean floor is divided into several different areas. The first is the continental shelf, the nearly flat, underwater extension of a continent. Continental shelves vary in width. They are usually wide along low-lying land, and narrow along mountainous coasts. A shelf is covered in ...
The ocean has five major life zones, each with organisms uniquely adapted to their specific marine ecosystem. Phytoplankton are a basis of the ocean food web. Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton are responsible for almost half the oxygen released into the Earths atmosphere. Animals such as krill (a type of shrimp), fish, and microscopic organisms...
The epipelagic zone (1) is the sunlit upper layer of the ocean. It reaches from the surface to about 200 meters (660 feet) deep. The epipelagic zone is also known as the photic or euphotic zone, and can exist in lakes as well as the ocean.
Phytoplankton also live in the epipelagic zone. Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms that include plants, algae, and bacteria. They are only visible when billions of them form algal blooms, and appear as green or blue splotches in the ocean.
The next zone down, stretching to about 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) deep, is the mesopelagic zone (2). This zone is also known as the twilight zone because the light there is very dim. The lack of sunlight means there are no plants in the mesopelagic zone, but large fish and whales dive there to hunt prey. Fish in this zone are small and luminous. On...
The water at the bottom of the ocean, the abyssopelagic zone (4), is very salty and cold (2 degrees Celsius, or 35 degrees Fahrenheit). At depths up to 6,000 meters (19,700 feet), the pressure is very strong11,000 pounds per square inch. This makes it impossible for most animals to live. Animals in this zone have bizarre adaptations to cope with th...
Many of the animals in this zone, including squid and fish, are bioluminescent. Bioluminescent organisms produce light through chemical reactions in their bodies. A type of angler fish, for example, has a glowing growth extending in front of its huge, toothy mouth. When smaller fish are attracted to the light, the angler fish simply snaps its jaws ...
Deep, cold currents transport oxygen to organisms throughout the ocean. They also carry rich supplies of nutrients that all living things need. The nutrients come from plankton and the remains of other organisms that drift down and decay on the ocean floor.
Along some coasts, winds and currents produce a phenomenon called upwelling. As winds push surface water away from shore, deep currents of cold water rise to take its place. This upwelling of deep water brings up nutrients that nourish new growth of plankton, providing food for fish. Ocean food chains constantly recycle food and energy this way.
Some ocean currents are enormous and extremely powerful. One of the most powerful is the Gulf Stream, a warm surface current that originates in the tropical Caribbean Sea and flows northeast along the eastern coast of the United States. The Gulf Stream measures up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and is more than a kilometer (3,281 feet) deep.
Through the centuries, people have sailed the ocean on trade routes. Today, ships still carry most of the worlds freight, particularly bulky goods such as machinery, grain, and oil. Ocean ports are areas of commerce and culture. Water and land transportation meet there, and so do people of different professions: businesspeople who import and export...
Scientists and other experts hope the ocean will be used more widely as a source of renewable energy. Some countries have already harnessed the energy of ocean waves, temperature, currents, or tides to power turbines and generate electricity.
Another source of renewable energy is ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC). It uses the difference in temperature between the warm surface water and cold deep water to run an engine. OTEC facilities exist in places with significant differences in ocean depth: Japan, India and the U.S. state of Hawaii, for instance.
Water on Earth is very abundant— about 71 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water. There are more than 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth. Earth’s oceans contain about 96.5 percent of all the planet’s water. Less than 3 percent of all water on Earth is freshwater (usable for drinking).
In all, water from oceans and marginal seas, saline groundwater and water from saline closed lakes amount to over 97% of the water on Earth, though no closed lake stores a globally significant amount of water.
Jun 6, 2018 · Earth's water is (almost) everywhere: above the Earth in the air and clouds, on the surface of the Earth in rivers, oceans, ice, plants, in living organisms, and inside the Earth in the top few miles of the ground. For an estimated explanation of where Earth's water exists, look at this bar chart.
