Level of life
Biosphere
All of Earth's ecosystems together: every place on the planet where life exists.
Ocean zones
The ocean is layered by depth. Only the upper 200 meters gets enough light for photosynthesis, and below 1,000 meters it is completely dark.Source: NOAASource: NOAA
Idea or model
How Ocean zones connects
Ocean zones is part of
Ocean zones includes
Structure
Hydrothermal vents
Hot springs on the seafloor, first explored on the Galápagos Rift in the late 1970s, where whole communities run on chemical energy.
Organism or group
Phytoplankton
Microscopic photosynthetic organisms drifting in sunlit water. Ocean producers account for roughly half of the carbon fixed on Earth each year.
Ocean zones is related to
Process
Bioluminescence
Light made by living things. In surveys off California, about three-quarters of the observed animals could make light.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
How far does light travel in the ocean? (opens the original in a new tab)
NOAA National Ocean Service. oceanservice.noaa.gov. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Fact sheetGovernment sourceLayers of the Ocean (opens the original in a new tab)
NOAA JetStream. noaa.gov. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
ReferenceGovernment sourceEducational