Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The bottom of the sea


What lies beneath the ocean ? What's at the bottom of the deep blue sea ? Tail mountains ! Great plains ! Deep valley ! Volcanoes !

The whole outside of the earth is covered with a rocky crust. The continents and islands, the parts on which we live, are the highest parts of the crust. The lowest parts are covered by the seas and oceans. So the bottom of the sea is really of the earth's rocky crust. It is much like the part we live on.

There is a great mountain range that runs down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It is longer than any mountain range on land. The tops of some of the mountains stick up out of the water, forming islands.

The deepest parts of the ocean are long, narrow valleys called trenches. The very deepest of these, called the Challenger Deep, is in the Pacific Ocean. There, the bottom of the trench is almost seven miles (11 kilometers) below the surface of the water.

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