If it were possible to remove all the water in the ocean and look at the ocean floor, what do you think you’d see? A boring, endless stretch of sand?
Well, you might see some areas like that. They’re called abyssal plains. But you’d also see many other kinds of formations, like huge mountains, thousand-mile-long trenches, volcanoes, deep basins, and plateaus.
The ocean floor is deep—the deepest spot is nearly seven miles down. It’s also pitch-black, because no light can reach it. It’s ice-cold, with temperatures near freezing. And the pressure is huge, because all that water above weighs, well, tons. Only the most advanced submarines can enter the deep sea without being totally crushed.
