The bottom of the sea
What lies beneath the ocean? What’s at the bottom of the deep blue sea?
Tall mountains! Great plains! Deep valleys! Volcanoes!
The whole outside of the earth is covered with a rocky crust. The
continents and islands, the parts on which we live, are the highest
parts of the crust. The lowest parts are covered by the seas and oceans.
So the
bottom of the sea is really part of the earth’s rocky crust. It is much
like the part we live on.
There is a great mountain range that runs down the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean. It is longer than any mountain range on land. The tops
of some of the mountains stick up out of the water, forming islands.
The deepest parts of the ocean are long, narrow valleys called trenches.
The very deepest of these, called the Mariana Trench, is in the Pacific
Ocean. There, the bottom of the trench is 36,198 feet (11,033 meters)
below the surface of the water.
