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Geologically, an ocean is an area of oceanic crust covered by water. Oceanic crust is the thin layer of solidified volcanic basalt that covers the Earth's mantle. Continental crust is thicker but less dense. From this perspective, the Earth has three oceans: the World Ocean, the Caspian Sea, [citation needed] and the Black Sea.
The oceanic zone is typically defined as the area of the ocean lying beyond the continental shelf (e.g. the neritic zone), but operationally is often referred to as beginning where the water depths drop to below 200 metres (660 ft), seaward from the coast into the open ocean with its pelagic zone. It is the region of open sea beyond the edge of ...
These canyons are often V-shaped, and can sometime enlarge onto the continental shelf. At the base of the continental slope, there is a sudden decrease in slope angle, and the sea floor begins to level out towards the abyssal plain. This portion of the seafloor is called the continental rise, and marks the outermost zone of the continental ...
The ocean zones can be grouped by light penetration into (from top to bottom): the photic zone, the mesopelagic zone and the aphotic deep ocean zone: The photic zone is defined to be "the depth at which light intensity is only 1% of the surface value". [12]: 36 This is usually up to a depth of approximately 200 m in the open ocean.
The sea commonly refers to the ocean, the interconnected body of seawaters that spans most of Earth. Particular seas are either marginal seas, second-order sections of the oceanic sea (e.g. the Mediterranean Sea), or certain large, nearly landlocked bodies of water.
The Aubach, a watercourse in Germany A fjord in Norway.. A body of water or waterbody [1] is any significant accumulation of water on the surface of Earth or another planet. The term most often refers to oceans, seas, and lakes, but it includes smaller pools of water such as ponds, wetlands, or more rarely, puddles.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to Oceanography.. Thermohaline circulation. Oceanography (from Ancient Greek ὠκεανός (ōkeanós) 'ocean' and γραφή (graphḗ) 'writing'), also known as oceanology, sea science, ocean science, and marine science, is the scientific study of the ocean, including its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology.
The seabed (also known as the seafloor, sea floor, ocean floor, and ocean bottom) is the bottom of the ocean. All floors of the ocean are known as 'seabeds'. The structure of the seabed of the global ocean is governed by plate tectonics. Most of the ocean is very deep, where the seabed is known as the abyssal plain. Seafloor spreading creates ...