the.com/seafloor
the planet's largest landscape, mapped worse than the surface of Mars.
means The seafloor is the solid bottom of an ocean, sea, or other large body of water — everything beneath the waves that you could, in theory, stand on.
from A plain English compound, bolted together from two old workhorses. "Sea" descends from Old English sǣ, with Germanic cousins all across the North Sea coast — Dutch zee, German See. "Floor" comes from Old English flōr, meaning the ground underfoot, related to words for a flat surface or plain across the Germanic and Celtic worlds. Put them side by side and you get exactly what it says: the floor of the sea. The term is fairly modern as a single word — the deep ocean bottom was, for most of history, an abstraction no one had the means to see, so naming it had to wait for the instruments that could reach down and touch it.
- barely seen
- Under 25 percent mapped in fine detail
- new crust
- Born continuously at mid-ocean ridge volcanoes
- snow falls
- Marine snow rains dead plankton constantly downward
- deepest point
- Challenger Deep sinks nearly 11 kilometers down
- recycled
- Old seafloor dives back into Earth's mantle
mariana trench — deepest oceanic trench on earth at 10,994 meters, located in western pacific ocean
mid-ocean ridge — 65,000+ km volcanic ridge system where new oceanic crust forms, runs through all oceans
abyssal plain — flat seafloor covering ~40% of ocean bottom at depths of 4,000-6,000 meters
black smoker hydrothermal vent — superheated mineral-rich vents discovered at east pacific rise, support unique ecosystems