Video Transcript

A tour of the deep

DR. JON COPLEY: Now that we have maps of the deep ocean, we know that it contains
features just as varied as those of the land. It's not just a single, dark, vast unknown
environment to us anymore. So around the land, we have the shallow continental shelves. And
these drop off rapidly on what we call the continental slopes, ringing the continents. And
these are cut in some places by spectacular underwater canyons. We're understanding how
those transfer materials from the shallows to the deeps. They're also populated by deep
water coral reefs, home to a lot of deep sea species.
We also have the Abyssal plains which are incredibly flat planes of fine mud. The underlying
crust here is covered by fine sediments that can be several kilometres thick. This is the
organic detritus that's rained down over millennium, millions of years from the ocean above.
And the Abyssal planes, the typical relief is about a gradient of one in 10,000. So that is
actually proportionately flatter than a pancake. They're actually some of the flattest parts of
the Earth's surface topography.
The Abyssal planes, though, are occasionally dotted by sea mounts. These are active or
extinct underwater volcanoes, rising as underwater mountains, more than 1,000 metres higher
than the surrounding sea floor. And we know that there are more than 39,000 of these all
around the world. But only a few hundred have been visually surveyed so far.
We've also got running around the centre of the oceans, bit like the seam on a tennis ball, a
spectacular chain of undersea volcanoes and underwater volcanic rift called the mid-ocean
ridge, 65,000 kilometres long. And this is where the plates of the Earth's ocean crust have
been created by volcanic activity as the gigantic plates of the Earth's crust get rifted apart as
they ride on convection cells in the Earth's mantle.
And the mid-ocean ridge is, of course, dotted by features such as deep sea hydrothermal
vents, which we'll be hearing more about in subsequent weeks of this course. At the other end
of the plates where one plate dips underneath another, in a process called subduction
ultimately to be destroyed and then recycled in the history of the Earth, we have the deep
ocean trenches going down to nearly 11 kilometres in depth.

University of Southampton 2014

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Exploring the Oceans

Video Transcript
We know now that there is marine life down to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches.
And there's no part of those trenches that's actually out of reach to us with our modern
technology these days. So those are some of the sea floor features that our mapping of the
deep has revealed. But we must also remember the vast interior volume of the ocean above
the sea bed as well. Because that's a huge habitat for life in the oceans as we'll be seeing in
week three.
Now from about 200 metres deep to 1,000 metres deep, sunlight is too faint for plants to
thrive. But there is still faint light coming from the surface. And we call that zone the twilight
zone. And here 90% of the animals that live there produce their own light through a process
called bioluminescence. And one of the reasons they do that is for camouflage. Because there
is still faint light down welling from above, they're going to be casting shadows. So in order to
obscure themselves from predators, they'll light themselves up perhaps to break up their
outline. And a lot of the predators have spectacular upward looking eyes, very sensitive to
spot the shadows of prey above them.
In this twilight zone, we get the world's most numerous vertebrates, bristle mouth fish. And
we also have our planet's greatest animal migration which is not wildebeests lumbering across
the African Savannah. It's actually deep water plankton rising up, commuting to surface
waters at dusk every evening to feed and back down into the depths at dawn.
Below 1,000 metres, we enter what we call the midnight zone. And this is the point beyond
which sunlight does not penetrate. But it's not a world of eternal perpetual darkness. There is
light down there still in the form of bioluminescence, light created by life. Here animals are
using that light for a variety of purposes, signalling to other members of the same species
perhaps to attract mates, to illuminate, light up their prey if they are hunters, and to distract
predators and hopefully escape.
So we now appreciate that the oceans are just as rich and varied in their landscape, their
environments as the land is. And we don't tend to generalise about life on land or the
geography of the land as if it were a single environment. And that's really the advance we've
made in the past 100, 150 years that we've been exploring the deep, unlocking the hidden
face of our planet for the first time.

University of Southampton 2014

Page 2 of 2

Exploring the Oceans