00:00You think you know the ocean.
00:02You've seen it.
00:03Maybe swum in it.
00:05Maybe stared at it from a beach and felt small.
00:08But here's what they never told you.
00:11We have explored more of the surface of Mars than the floor beneath those waves.
00:17The planet you live on.
00:2070% water.
00:21Dopt going deep isn't money.
00:24It isn't politics.
00:25It's the ocean itself.
00:27Because the ocean doesn't want you there.
00:30And it has ways of making that very clear.
00:34Start with the pressure.
00:36At the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on this planet,
00:42the weight of the water above you is equivalent to 50 jumbo jets stacked on your chest,
00:48every square inch of your body, at once.
00:51You wouldn't just die.
00:53You'd be compacted into something unrecognizable in seconds.
00:57Therefore, only three humans have ever made it down there.
01:01Three in all of human history.
01:04Two oceanographers in 1960,
01:07and filmmaker James Cameron alone in 2012.
01:11Three people.
01:13Compare that to the 600 who have gone to space,
01:17or the thousands who have climbed Everest.
01:19The deep ocean is harder to reach than outer space.
01:24Think about that for a moment.
01:26But the pressure is only the beginning.
01:29Drop below 200 meters, that's about the height of a 60-story building,
01:33and the sunlight disappears entirely.
01:37Not dims.
01:38Disappears.
01:39You are in permanent, absolute, total darkness.
01:43The temperature hovers just above freezing,
01:46and you are completely, entirely alone.
01:51Or so you'd think.
01:52Because something lives down there.
01:55In the twilight, where the last threads of light dissolve,
02:00creatures glow.
02:01Not because of sunlight, there is none,
02:03but from within.
02:04Cold, chemical fire in the dark.
02:07Fish with lanterns dangling from their heads.
02:11Creatures that produce their own light to hunt,
02:13to hide, to lure.
02:15Go deeper still, and the lights vanish too.
02:19Here, in what scientists called the midnight zone,
02:23things have stopped needing eyes altogether.
02:25What's the point?
02:26There is nothing to see.
02:28Animals in this layer survive on what falls from above.
02:32A slow, ghostly rain of dead organic material
02:35drifting down from the world they'll never visit.
02:38An entire ecosystem surviving on scraps from another world.
02:43But the truly bizarre stuff?
02:46That lives even further down.
02:49At the very bottom, the abyss,
02:52something unexpected was waiting for explorers.
02:55Life.
02:56Not just bacteria clinging to rocks.
02:59Actual, complex life.
03:01Snailfish.
03:03Isopods the size of footballs.
03:05Creatures that have never seen light,
03:07never needed it.
03:08They cluster around cracks in the ocean floor,
03:11where the earth itself is venting superheated water.
03:15Water hot enough to melt lead.
03:17And they thrive in it.
03:18Their entire food chain runs on chemical energy from the earth's core,
03:23instead of sunlight.
03:24It's as if they evolved on a completely different planet,
03:28one that exists six miles beneath your feet.
03:31Therefore, scientists now believe that if life exists elsewhere in the universe,
03:36on the ice moons of Jupiter or Saturn, for instance,
03:40it might look exactly like this,
03:42thriving in darkness,
03:44in crushing cold,
03:45completely independent of a sun.
03:48The deep ocean isn't just a mystery.
03:51It's a preview.
03:53The Mary Celeste was found drifting in the Atlantic.
03:57Sails set.
03:58Cargo intact.
03:59Food still on the table.
04:01Lifeboat missing.
04:02No storm damage.
04:04No signs of a fight.
04:05No blood.
04:06No bodies.
04:07No crew.
04:08Just an empty ship, adrift,
04:11as if every single person on board had simply blinked out of existence mid-meal.
04:17No explanation has ever been proven.
04:20The SS Waratah vanished in 1909 with 211 people aboard.
04:27Not a single piece of debris was ever found.
04:30Not a plank.
04:31Not a life jacket.
04:32Nothing.
04:33A ship carrying hundreds of people evaporated off the coast of South Africa.
04:38Therefore, you start to understand why sailors have always feared the sea differently than the rest of us.
04:46And off that same South African coast, something changed in 2017.
04:52Two killer whales, nicknamed Port and Starbird, started hunting great white sharks.
04:58But not for food.
04:59Not exactly.
05:01They would chase the shark, flip it upside down, hold it there until it went limp,
05:06a trance sharks fall into when inverted.
05:09And then, with surgical precision, they tear open the shark's body and extract only the liver.
05:16One organ.
05:18Nothing else.
05:19Just the liver.
05:21Scientists have no idea why.
05:24They don't know if this behavior spread to other orcas.
05:27They don't know if it will escalate.
05:29They just know it started, suddenly, without warning.
05:33The ocean decided to change the rules.
05:36And no one asked permission.
05:39Now, the sounds.
05:42Since 1991, hydrophones planted deep in the Pacific Ocean,
05:47basically massive underwater microphones,
05:49have been picking up a sound.
05:51A whale.
05:52A rising, sweeping pitch that climbs and climbs before fading,
05:57then starts again.
05:58It peaks every spring, every autumn, like clockwork.
06:03Nobody knows what it is.
06:05Not a whale, not a geological event, not a man-made machine.
06:10It simply exists, rising somewhere between New Zealand and South America
06:15in one of the most remote stretches of water on Earth
06:18and repeating itself reliably year after year for over 30 decades.
06:25But in 2016, something stranger happened.
06:28A sound, described as a ping, began radiating from the seafloor in the Canadian Arctic.
06:35Animals fled the area.
06:37Hunters noticed wildlife had completely abandoned a stretch of water.
06:41The Canadian military sent aircraft to investigate.
06:44They found nothing.
06:47And then, there's the ocean floor itself.
06:50Hidden beneath the water, there is a waterfall.
06:54The largest waterfall on Earth.
06:56You've never heard of it, because it's completely submerged.
06:59Cold water cascades over a cliff in the ocean floor between Greenland and Iceland
07:04and plunges nearly 11,500 feet straight down.
07:09For context, Niagara Falls drops 167 feet.
07:14Angel Falls, the tallest on land, drops about 3,200 feet.
07:18This one falls 11,500, silently, invisibly, constantly.
07:26And then, there are lakes.
07:28Actual lakes on the ocean floor.
07:31Pools of water so dense and so salty that they sit beneath the surrounding sea
07:36like a separate body of water with its own shoreline.
07:40If you were somehow swimming down there and drifted into one,
07:43the chemical shock would kill you almost instantly.
07:46Lakes inside the ocean.
07:50Waterfalls bigger than anything on land.
07:53Off the coast of Japan, divers exploring a reef
07:58found something that stopped the scientific community cold.
08:02A massive stone structure.
08:04Right angles, stacked platforms,
08:07what appears to be a staircase spiraling upward,
08:10sitting on the sea floor.
08:12Some researchers believe it is 10,000 years old.
08:16A sunken city making simple tools.
08:19And the ocean rose and swallowed it
08:21and kept the secret for 10 millennia.
08:24How many others are down there?
08:26Because the ocean is enormous in a way that is genuinely difficult
08:30for a human brain to process.
08:32It covers 71% of the planet.
08:36It holds 97% of all the water that exists on Earth.
08:40And as of 2024, only 26% of the sea floor has been mapped in any meaningful detail.
08:48Satellites have technically scanned the whole thing,
08:51but the resolution is so poor
08:53that anything smaller than three miles across is completely invisible.
08:58Entire mountain ranges, entire shipwrecks, gone.
09:02But here's where the story turns darker.
09:04In 2018, a camera reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
09:09one of the most isolated, unreachable places on the face of this Earth.
09:13And on the sea floor, resting quietly in the dark,
09:17six miles below the surface of the world, was a plastic bag.
09:21We stopped exploring the ocean not because we ran out of curiosity.
09:25We stopped because the ocean is hostile and ancient and vast,
09:30and indifferent to our presence in a way that is hard to fully confront.
09:33But here's the real terror.
09:35We know what lives in a forest.
09:38We know what lives on a mountain.
09:40We've catalogued, named, and studied almost everything that walks or flies on land.
09:45The ocean holds somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million species.
09:51That's the range scientists are working with.
09:53A potential difference of nearly 2 million unknown creatures
09:57living beneath your feet, right now, in the dark, in the cold.
10:03In the silence, waiting, not for us to find them,
10:08but simply existing in a world that has never needed us and never will.
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