Science
Draining the World’s Oceans to Visualize Earth’s Surface
Draining the World’s Oceans to Visualize Earth’s Surface
Although many maps of our planet go into great topographical detail on land, almost two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered by the world’s oceans.
Hidden from sight lie aquatic mountain ranges, continental shelves, and trenches that dive deep into the Earth’s crust. We might be familiar with a few of the well-known formations on the ocean floor, but there’s a whole detailed “world” that’s as rich as the surface, just waiting to be explored.
This animation from planetary researcher James O’Donoghue of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA simulates the draining the world’s oceans to quickly reveal the full extent of the Earth’s surface.
How Deep Does the Ocean Go?
Above sea level, Earth’s topography reaches all the way up to 8,849 meters (29,032 ft) to the top of Mt. Everest. But going below sea level, it actually goes deeper than the height of Everest.
Open ocean is called the pelagic zone, which can be broken down into five regions by depth:
- 0m–200m: Epipelagic (sunlight zone). Illuminated shallower waters that contain most of the ocean’s plants and animals.
- 200m–1,000m: Mesopelagic (twilight zone). Stretches from where 1% of surface light reaches to where surface light ends. Contains mainly bacteria, as well as some large organisms like the swordfish and the squid.
- 1,000m–4,000m: Bathypelagic (midnight zone). Pitch black outside of a few bioluminescent organisms, with no living plants. Smaller anglerfish, squid, and sharks live here, as well as a few large organisms like giant squid.
- 4,000m–6,000m: Abyssopelagic (abyssal zone). Long thought to be the bottomless end of the sea, the abyssal zone reaches to just above the ocean floor and contains little life due to extremely cold temperatures, high pressures, and complete darkness.
- 6,000m–11,000m: Hadopelagic (hadal zone). Named after Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, the hadal zone is the deepest part of the ocean. It can be found primarily in trenches below the ocean floor.
To put ocean depths into context, the bottom of the ocean is more than 2,000m greater than the peak of Mount Everest.
What “Draining” the World’s Oceans Reveals
For a long time, the ocean floor was believed to be less understood than the Moon.
The sheer depth of water made it difficult to map without newer technology, and the tremendous pressure and extreme temperatures make navigation grueling. A manned vehicle reached the deepest known point of the Mariana Trench—the Challenger Deep—in 1960, almost 90 years after it was first charted in 1872.
But over the last few decades, humanity’s understanding and exploration of the ocean floor has grown in leaps and bounds. O’Donoghue’s animation shows just how much detail we’ve been missing.
The first easily noticeable characteristic is the Earth’s continental shelves, which appear quickly. Most are visible by 140 meters, though the Arctic and Antarctic shelves are far deeper.
The animation then speeds up, as thousands of meters of depth reveal the tops of small mountain ridges and aquatic islands. From 2,000 to 3,000 meters, mid-ocean ridges appear that span the length of the Arctic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
From 3,000 to 6,000 meters of ocean drained, these aquatic mountains slowly give way to the vast majority of the ocean floor. Little changes over the final 5,000 meters except to illustrate just how deep the ocean’s trenches reach.
Of course, technically the bottom of the Challenger deep is the deepest known point of the Mariana Trench. As satellite and imaging technology improves further, and aquatic mapping voyages become more possible, who knows what else we’ll discover beneath the waves.

This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.
Green
The Anthropocene: A New Epoch in the Earth’s History
We visualize Earth’s history through the geological timeline to reveal the planet’s many epochs, including the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene: A New Epoch in the Earth’s History
Over the course of Earth’s history, there have been dramatic shifts in the landscape, climate, and biodiversity of the planet. And it is all archived underground.
Layers of the planet’s crust carry evidence of pivotal moments that changed the face of the Earth, such as the ice age and asteroid hits. And scientists have recently defined the next major epoch using this geological time scale—the Anthropocene.
In this infographic we dig deep into the Earth’s geological timeline to reveal the planet’s shift from one epoch to another, and the specific events that separate them.
Understanding the Geological Timeline
The Earth’s geological history is divided into many distinct units, from eons to ages. The time span of each varies, since they’re dependent on major events like new species introduction, as well as how they fit into their parent units.
Geochronologic unit | Time span | Example |
---|---|---|
Eon | Several hundred million years to two billion years | Phanerozoic |
Era | Tens to hundreds of millions of years | Cenozoic |
Period | Millions of years to tens of millions of years | Quaternary |
Epoch | Hundreds of thousands of years to tens of millions of years | Holocene |
Age | Thousands of years to millions of years | Meghalayan |
Note: Subepochs (between epochs and ages) have also been ratified for use in 2022, but are not yet clearly defined.
If we were to cut a mountain in half, we could notice layers representing these changing spans of time, marked by differences in chemical composition and accumulated sediment.
Some boundaries are so distinct and so widespread in the geologic record that they are known as “golden spikes.” Golden spikes can be climatic, magnetic, biological, or isotopic (chemical).
Earth’s Geological Timeline Leading Up to the Anthropocene
The Earth has gone through many epochs leading up to the modern Anthropocene.
These include epochs like the Early Devonian, which saw the dawn of the first early shell organisms 400 million years ago, and the three Jurassic epochs, which saw dinosaurs become the dominant terrestrial vertebrates.
Over the last 11,700 years, we have been living in the Holocene epoch, a relatively stable period that enabled human civilization to flourish. But after millennia of human activity, this epoch is quickly making way for the Anthropocene.
Epoch | Its start (MYA = Million Years Ago) |
---|---|
Anthropocene | 70 Years Ago |
Holocene | 0.01 MYA |
Pleistocene | 2.58 MYA |
Pliocene | 5.33 MYA |
Miocene | 23.04 MYA |
Oligocene | 33.90 MYA |
Eocene | 56.00 MYA |
Paleocene | 66.00 MYA |
Cretaceous | 145.0 MYA |
Jurassic | 201.40 MYA |
Triassic | 251.90 MYA |
Lopingian | 259.50 MYA |
Guadalupian | 273.00 MYA |
Cisuralian | 300.00 MYA |
Pennsylvanian | 323.40 MYA |
Mississippian | 359.30 MYA |
Devonian | 419.00 MYA |
Silurian | 422.70 MYA |
Ludlow | 426.70 MYA |
Wenlock | 432.90 MYA |
Llandovery | 443.10 MYA |
Ordovician | 486.90 MYA |
Furongian | 497.00 MYA |
Miaolingian | 521.00 MYA |
Terreneuvian | 538.80 MYA |
The Anthropocene is distinguished by a myriad of imprints on the Earth including the proliferation of plastic particles and a noticeable increase in carbon dioxide levels in sediments.
A New Chapter in Earth’s History
The clearest identified marker of this geological time shift, and the chosen golden spike for the Anthropocene, is radioactive plutonium from nuclear testing in the 1950s.
The best example has been found in the sediment of Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada. The lake has two distinct layers of water that never intermix, causing falling sediments to settle in distinct layers at its bed over time.
While the International Commission on Stratigraphy announced the naming of the new epoch in July 2023, Crawford Lake is still in the process of getting approved as the site that marks the new epoch. If selected, our planet will officially enter the Crawfordian Age of the Anthropocene.
-
Misc3 weeks ago
Ranked: The World’s Largest Stadiums
-
Maps1 week ago
The Incredible Historical Map That Changed Cartography
-
Markets2 weeks ago
Charted: Six Red Flags Pointing to China’s Economy Slowing Down
-
VC+6 days ago
What’s New on VC+ in September
-
Maps4 weeks ago
Visualizing the BRICS Expansion in 4 Charts
-
Markets2 weeks ago
The 25 Best Stocks by Shareholder Wealth Creation (1926-2022)
-
Business3 days ago
Ranked: The 20 Best Franchises to Open in the U.S.
-
AI4 weeks ago
Nvidia vs. AMD vs. Intel: Comparing AI Chip Sales