The Ocean
Depending on how the zone is defined, the aphotic zone of the ocean begins between depths of roughly 200 m (660 ft) or 1,000 m (3,300 ft), and extends to the ocean floor. Temperatures can range from roughly 0 °C (32 °F) to 6 °C (43 °F). Unusual and unique creatures dwell in this expanse of pitch black water, such as the gulper eel, the giant squid, the anglerfish, and the vampire squid.
The aphotic zone is further divided into additional zones: the bathyal zone, the abyssal zone, and the hadal zone. The bathyal zone extends from 200 metres (656 ft) to 2,000 metres (6,562 ft). The abyssal zone extends from 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) to 6,000 metres (19,685 ft). The hadal zone spans from depths of 6,000 metres (20,000 ft) to the ocean floor. Creatures in these areas must be able to live in complete darkness.
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Famous quotes containing the word ocean:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)