50 Deep Facts About World’s Oceans

The reason the ocean is salty is because of the minerals that are constantly being added by the rivers, but what really causes the ocean to not become saturated with salt is because of the mineral exchange with the magma at the seafloor. Ocean water goes inside the earth into magma chambers and out, every 6-8 million years. We didn’t discover this until about 1979.

2. Sea level rise is caused by two main factors, melting land ice (glaciers), and “thermal expansion” which is the expansion of space between water molecules as the ocean gets warmer. So the ocean is both gaining water molecules and the water molecules are spreading out and taking up more space.

3. Cruise ships dump over a billion gallons of poop and untreated sewage from their passengers into the ocean every year.

4. The deepest ocean sinkhole in the world is in the South China Sea and is named the Dragon Hole, or Longdong. It is roughly 987 feet deep. Below 328 feet, the hole is devoid of oxygen and deadly to marine life.

5. The Chicxulub Impact, the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, created a mega-tsunami that was over 330 feet tall. If the impact had struck the deep ocean rather than the shallow seas, the wave would have peaked at 2.9 miles.

When Victor Vescovo reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest trench in the world, he discovered a plastic bag and candy wrappers at 10,928 meters (35,849 ft.) below the surface, confirming that human-generated waste can pollute even the deepest parts of the ocean.

7. “Flotsam” is floating wreckage, “jetsam” is cargo that is purposely thrown overboard, “lagan” is goods lying at the bottom of the ocean but reclaimable, and “derelict” is cargo at the bottom of the ocean but lost. These terms are part of the law of admiralty and marine salvage.

8. There’s a “dead spot” in the Black Sea where scientists have found ships as old as 1200 years preserved well enough to see chisel marks from the original builder.

9. Aleksander Doba is a Polish kayaker known primarily for his long voyages across oceans. He kayaked across the Atlantic Ocean under his own power on three separate occasions. He completed his last crossing at the age of 70. His passages remain the longest open-water kayak voyages ever made

10. It is 100% legal to be buried at sea in the USA. You basically wrap the body in a sheet with some weights, at least 3 miles from shore and throw it off the boat. The Navy even has a program to assist veterans of the armed services.

The earth's oceans may be teeming with massive, hollow, worm-like entities called pyrosome that can grow as big as a sperm whale.

12. If we could capture just 0.1% of the ocean’s kinetic energy caused by tides, we could satisfy the current global energy demand 5 times over.

13. Over 90% of the ocean’s plastic waste comes from just 10 rivers, 8 of which are in Asia, and 2 of which are in Africa.

14. Modern nuclear submarines are so well cloaked that in 2009, two nuclear ballistic missile submarines (French and British) collided in the Atlantic Ocean by pure chance. Moving very slowly, they weren’t able to detect each other just feet apart.

15. 70% of the world’s oxygen supply actually comes from the ocean as opposed to trees.

When ships pass through Point Nemo in the southern Pacific Ocean, the closest other humans they are to are in the International Space Station 400 km up.

17. A total of nine nuclear submarines have been sunk around the world and most remain on the ocean floor with their nuclear weapons and reactors intact.

18. Jeff Bezos funded a team that searched the Atlantic Ocean for discarded NASA rockets. By 2013, the team salvaged two rockets. After careful inspection, the team realized they found part of the rockets used to carry Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon on Apollo 11.

19. Every year hundreds of Great White Sharks migrate to a random area in the mid-Pacific ocean and loiter around, no one knowing why. This area has been named the “White Shark Cafe.”

20. More people have been to the moon than to the bottom of the ocean’s deepest point, Mariana Trench.

‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ refers not to depth, but the distance traveled whilst submerged.

22. Most of the internet data is not transferred across continents by satellites. Instead, 97% of intercontinental data is transferred through hundreds of thousands of miles of cables at the bottom of the ocean.

23. There is an area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where retired spacecraft have been routinely deposited. It is known as the “Spacecraft Cemetery”, and notably it is also the place where the defunct Mir space station rests.

24. Old NYC subway cars are dumped into the Atlantic Ocean to help build an artificial reef to serve as a habitat for marine life.

25. When a whale dies and its carcass falls into the Bathyal or Abyssal zone of the ocean floor, it can sustain a complex localized ecosystem of deep-sea organisms for decades. This is called a “whale fall”.