Ocean gyres trace some of the largest moving patterns on Earth. From space, they resemble broad loops drawn across entire ocean basins. A bottle, a drifting buoy, or a patch of warm water can spend months to years following part of one of these routes. The motion is steady enough to shape climate, steer marine…
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Beneath the ocean’s bright surface lies a vertical world that changes dramatically with depth. Sunlight fades, water pressure rises and the animals that can survive there become very different. Oceanographers divide this open-water realm into five broad pelagic zones. Together, they trace a journey from the plankton-filled surface to the trenches at full ocean depth.…
NOAA Ocean Exploration’s historical account preserves Jacques Piccard’s description of the January 23, 1960 descent of the Trieste bathyscaphe to Challenger Deep. Piccard and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh became the first people to reach the deepest known part of the ocean, then measured at roughly 35,800 feet. Their dive showed that people could enter…
NOAA‘s Mapping Friendly Floatees lesson turns a 1992 cargo accident into a map of moving water. A container of almost 29,000 plastic bath toys went overboard in the North Pacific during a storm. Reports of toys reaching shore later gave oceanographers real dates and places to compare with their ideas about how the ocean moves.…
