Deep sea

The deep sea is broadly defined as the ocean depth where light begins to fade, at an approximate depth of 200 m (660 ft) or the point of transition from continental shelves to continental slopes. Conditions within the deep sea are a combination of low temperatures, darkness, and high pressure. The deep sea is considered the least explored Earth biome as the extreme conditions make the environment difficult to access and explore.

Organisms living within the deep sea have a variety of adaptations to survive in these conditions. Organisms can survive in the deep sea through a number of feeding methods including scavenging, predation and filtration, with a number of organisms surviving by feeding on marine snow. Marine snow is organic material that has fallen from upper waters into the deep sea.

In 1960, the bathyscaphe Trieste descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench near Guam, at 10,911 m (35,797 ft; 6.780 mi), the deepest known spot in any ocean. If Mount Everest (8,848 m or 29,029 ft or 5.498 mi) were submerged there, its peak would be more than 2 km (1.2 mi) beneath the surface. After the Trieste was retired, the Japanese remote-operated vehicle (ROV) Kaikō was the only vessel capable of reaching this depth until it was lost at sea in 2003. In May and June 2009, the hybrid-ROV Nereus returned to the Challenger Deep for a series of three dives to depths exceeding 10,900 m (35,800 ft; 6.8 mi).

Natural light does not penetrate the deep ocean, with the exception of the upper parts of the mesopelagic. Since photosynthesis is not possible, plants and phytoplankton cannot live in this zone, and as these are the primary producers of almost all of earth's ecosystems, life in this area of the ocean must depend on energy sources from elsewhere. Except for the areas close to the hydrothermal vents, this energy comes from organic material drifting down from the photic zone. The sinking organic material is composed of algal particulates, detritus, and other forms of biological waste, which is collectively referred to as marine snow.

Because pressure in the ocean increases by about 1 atmosphere for every 10 meters of depth, the amount of pressure experienced by many marine organisms is extreme. Until recent years, the scientific community lacked detailed information about the effects of pressure on most deep sea organisms because the specimens encountered arrived at the surface dead or dying and weren't observable at the pressures at which they lived. With the advent of traps that incorporate a special pressure-maintaining chamber, undamaged larger metazoan animals have been retrieved from the deep sea in good condition.^{[citation needed]}

Salinity is remarkably constant throughout the deep sea, at about 35 parts per thousand. There are some minor differences in salinity, but none that are ecologically significant, except in largely landlocked seas like the Mediterranean and Red Seas^{[citation needed]}.

The two areas of greatest temperature gradient in the oceans are the transition zone between the surface waters and the deep waters, the thermocline, and the transition between the deep-sea floor and the hot water flows at the hydrothermal vents. Thermoclines vary in thickness from a few hundred meters to nearly a thousand meters. Below the thermocline, the water mass of the deep ocean is cold and far more homogeneous. Thermoclines are strongest in the tropics, where the temperature of the epipelagic zone is usually above 20 °C (68 °F). From the base of the epipelagic, the temperature drops over several hundred meters to 5–6 °C at 1,000 meters (41–43 °F at 3,300 ft). It continues to decrease to the bottom, but the rate is much slower. The cold water stems from sinking heavy surface water in the polar regions.

At any given depth, the temperature is practically unvarying over long periods of time, without seasonal changes and with very little interannual variability. No other habitat on earth has such a constant temperature.