47 facts, each with a source
Ocean facts
Ocean facts from a place we have mapped less thoroughly than Mars. A male anglerfish merges with his mate for good, there are lakes at the bottom of the ocean, and below about 8,400 metres there are no fish at all. Each fact links to its source.
Deep Sea
- A male anglerfish merges with his mate. Permanently.
- There are lakes at the bottom of the ocean.
- The giant squid has the largest eye of any animal.
- There are seafloor springs at 400°C that do not boil.
- The barreleye fish has a transparent dome for a forehead.
- Below 8,400 metres, there are no fish. There can't be.
- A dead whale feeds the seafloor for fifty years.
- The deep sea presses a car's weight on every square cm.
- Mount Everest could sink into the Mariana Trench and vanish.
- Making your own light is the normal way to live on this planet.
- The layer of ocean nobody visits holds most of the fish.
Coral Reefs
Marine Mammals
- Whale songs go through fashions.
- Ambergris forms in a sperm whale's gut and is found floating or washed up on beaches.
- Sea otters have pockets.
- A blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an elephant.
- The finest candles were pressed from spermaceti, the waxy oil filling a sperm whale's head.
- A sperm whale's click is the loudest sound any animal makes, and it is produced by a nose.
- A narwhal's tusk is a single tooth grown out through the lip, and it is porous, with millions of nerve endings reaching the surface.
- Dolphins sleep with half a brain at a time.
- A blue whale's heart can beat just twice a minute.
- For a century the streetlamps of European and American cities burned whale oil.
- A blue whale calf drinks enough milk to gain around 90 kg a day.
Shipwrecks
Oceanography
- The Mediterranean dried to salt flats around five million years ago.
- The most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth was not discovered until 1986.
- There is a waterfall in the ocean bigger than any on land.
- We have better maps of Mars than of our own seafloor.
- Mars is better mapped than Earth's own seafloor.
- Sea level is not level.
- Sound moves four times faster underwater.
- One ocean current is the only reason Europe is not Siberia.
- A layer about a kilometre down traps sound instead of letting it escape.
- There is enough salt in the sea to bury every continent.
- The longest mountain range on Earth is underwater.
- The Pacific is bigger than every landmass on Earth combined.
- Sailors' stories of freak walls of water were dismissed as exaggeration until New Year's Day 1995, when an instrument on a North Sea platform recorded one 26 metres high.