From the sunlit surface to the deepest place in the ocean, 10,935 metres down. Watch the light fade, the pressure build and the water cool, and meet what lives at every level.
The colour of this page is the real colour of the light that is left at each depth.
Scroll to dive ↓
The whole dive in three graphs
Sunlight is gone in the first kilometre. Temperature does most of its falling in the same stretch. Pressure keeps climbing at the same steady rate all the way down. Switch to true depth to see it as a straight line.
Show the numbers
How deep did they go?
People, machines and animals on one true-scale ruler. Everything a diver can do fits in the first sliver.
What is simplified
The scroll is stretched. The sunlit zone gets far more room on the page than its true share. The tape on the right edge is the true scale.
The light is a model of the clearest open-ocean water (ten colour bands, each fading at its own measured rate). Coastal water is murkier and goes dark much sooner. Brightness on screen is compressed, the way your eyes adapt: the real light at 200 m is less than 1% of the surface.
The temperature is a typical tropical profile, like the western Pacific above the Mariana Trench. Polar seas are cold from top to bottom. In the trench the water gets very slightly warmer with depth, because it is squeezed.
Pressure at the bottom is often quoted as 1,086 bar. Working it out from the density of seawater gives a little more, so this page says “about 1,100 atmospheres”.
Records move. The three crewed dives to Challenger Deep were each measured a little differently (between about 10,908 and 10,928 m), so they are shown together as “about 10,900 m”. Animal records are the deepest dives anyone has measured, not what the animal does every day.
Animals are not to scale with each other, and each one is drawn at one depth although most roam across a range.
Sources
Light zones and how far light travels: NOAA Ocean Explorer. Colour fading rates: Jerlov’s optical water types (type I) and Pope & Fry (1997), pure-water absorption.