Ok so there is the ocean floor that we can walk on when we swim in the ocean and the deep ocean floor where things like crabs and coral reefs and starfish and what not live so how does it get all deeper with like no floor for so deep? Does the floor just all drop off at one point and get lower like a huge bowl? Or is the ocean floor all uneven with just random huge trenches that go really deep? If that is the case are all the deep sea animals in these trenches just like stuck to the area in their trench and can never get out of it and not communicate with other organisms outside the trench? I’m just confused how it all works
In: Geology
Because earth has a lot of water. If there was no water you’d be asking instead how are mountains so tall?
Imagine mountains, but backwards and more stretched out. It starts at ground level and starts to go deeper and deeper.
It’s like the surface. Mountains, the tallest become islands. Valleys are the deep trenches. Its erosion is different but it’s the same ideas, just these are under immense amount of water.
It’s like the surface, uneven with flat areas, hilly areas, mountains, and canyons. Here’s a map that gives you an idea:
[https://c8.alamy.com/comp/bcmn2r/world-map-shaded-relief-with-shaded-ocean-floor-bcmn2r.jpg](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/bcmn2r/world-map-shaded-relief-with-shaded-ocean-floor-bcmn2r.jpg)
As far as the animals in trenches, it’s also similar to the surface, in that some types of animals stay in the same spot their whole life, others move around somewhat, and others can move huge distances.
So there’s these things under the surface of the Earth called tectonic plates. They basically sit on top of the Earth’s mantel which is the liquid lava part. Those plates are constantly moving. Each plate contains a portion of the land mass you’re familiar with but they extend beyond just the land too.
There are three different ways tectonic plates can interact with each other. They can sheer or rub together which results in earthquakes like in California or Japan. Think rubbing two stones against each other. They can converge, which over millions of years makes mountains like the Himalayas. Think like a piece of paper on a table, push the two ends towards each other and the middle pops up, right? They can also diverge or pull away from each other.
Your question is referring to diverging tectonic plates, which is where you get the deep trenches in the ocean or just oceans in general. Before the oceans the Earth was just forming and there were basically just different elevations of land. At some point, I just heard about this and I think it’s so cool, it started raining and it didn’t stop for like a million years! So you have the higher elevation, the land masses and what used to be the lower elevation which after a million freaking years of rain, became oceans! Again the tectonic plates moving away from each other causes those trenches super deep in the oceans that you asked about. Divergent tectonic plates also are the source of most volcanos in the world, basically opening up a hole in the Earth’s surface that allows the magma from inside the Earth to escape.
TL/DR: divergent tectonic plates are the cause for the super deep trenches in the oceans.
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