The Big Picture
This 40,389-mile-long chain is the longest mountain range in the world.
What are mid-ocean ridges?
Although it looks like black smoke, the substance billowing from these vents is actually this.
What is searing hot, dark (mineral-rich) water?
This is the name for an underwater volcano that hasn't reached the surface.
What is a seamount?
This is the name of the deepest known point in the Mariana Trench.
What is the Challenger Deep?
This theory, supported by evidence of seafloor spreading, describes how Earth's surface is made of moving sections.
What is plate tectonics?
This theory, which was a key clue to solving the mystery of continental drift, suggests the seafloor is moving apart.
What is seafloor spreading?
Water at a hydrothermal vent can reach this astonishing temperature.
What is 750°F?
A seamount becomes one of these if it grows high enough to break the ocean's surface.
What is an island?
The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is equivalent to having three of these heavy vehicles pressing on every inch of your body.
What are SUVs?
This term refers to the hot, liquid rock lying below the Earth's crust that can rise to the surface to form new seafloor.
What is magma?
This specific underwater mountain range marks the boundary between several tectonic plates in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
What is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?
These red-topped creatures are the largest animals found near the vents and can grow as tall as a person.
What are giant tube worms?
This famous U.S. island chain formed over a "hotspot" in the center of the Pacific Plate.
What is the Hawaiian Island chain?
In 2012, this Canadian filmmaker and explorer traveled to the bottom of the trench in the Deepsea Challenger.
Who is James Cameron?
This specific type of rock, which makes up most of the oceanic crust, is what seawater dissolves minerals from near vents.
What is basalt?
Scientists compare the way mid-ocean ridges wrap around the Earth to the stitching on this sports ball.
What is a baseball?
Scientists use these types of vehicles to take pictures of vents after locating a mineral plume.
What are robot vehicles?
Seamounts are often teeming with life because flowing water brings these up from the ocean bottom.
What are nutrients?
These two men were the first to reach the bottom of the trench in 1960.
Who are Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard?
This is the name for the boundary where one tectonic plate slides underneath another.
What is a subduction zone?
While the average ocean depth is 14,000 feet, this "deep slash" in the ocean bottom is the deepest place on the planet.
What is an ocean trench (specifically the Mariana Trench)?
This is the process that causes the water to look like "smoke": hot vent water meets cold seawater, causing these to become solid again.
What are dissolved minerals?
Scientists estimate there are at least this many seamounts over 3,000 feet tall in the world's oceans.
What is 100,000?
The first expedition to the Challenger Deep took place in this vessel, which took five hours to descend.
What is the Trieste?
This early 20th-century idea proposed by Alfred Wegener suggested that continents were once joined and have since moved apart.
What is continental drift?