Just How Deep Is the Ocean? Watch and See

Even if you’ve memorized the depths of every sea and ocean on Earth, visualizing them is another matter entirely. Spanish animator Álvaro Gracia Montoya recently shared a video on his YouTube channel, MetaBallStudios, that’ll help. As Nerdist reports, the video starts off with a relatively shallow body of water—Eastern Europe’s Sea of Azov, with an average depth of roughly 23 feet—and moves on through other bodies of water in order of depth.

As the video progresses, notable landmarks appear to give you a frame of reference. If the Eiffel Tower were located at Lake Superior’s deepest point, about 1332 feet, there would still be nearly 270 feet of water above its tip. And if you put the Eiffel Tower next to the wreck of the USS Johnston—a World War II naval ship sunk during the Battle of Leyte Gulf and confirmed found earlier this year in the Philippine Sea—it looks as small as a toy. At 21,180 feet, the Johnston is the deepest shipwreck ever discovered.

The 305-foot Statue of Liberty looks similarly tiny when situated beside the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, with more than 12,000 feet of water above it. But the Atlantic goes much deeper than that, down to nearly 27,500 feet; Mount Everest outstretches it by about 1500 feet.

Even Everest can’t compete with the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, whose southern edge hits 36,200 feet—the deepest point of any ocean and the final stop in the video below.

For more help visualizing hard-to-fathom depths, sizes, lengths, and other measurements, be sure to check out MetaBallStudios’ other videos. Gracia Montoya has also covered the age of the universe, fictional starships, and lots more.