The seventy per cent of earth is under oceans and there are many facts about the ocean which you dont know. There are many mysterious features that you can find under the ocean. We will now discuss two of these features these are called ocean ridges and ocean trenches. This will help you to understand what exactly these features are and how the ships should protect themselves from these features.

Ocean Facts: Trenches and Ridges

There is a mountain system under the oceans. There are also many active volcanoes that you can find under the ocean. It is a different world all together. You will be surprised to know that the largest active volcanoes are located under the water. This mountain system and volcanoes have given rise to some unique features. These are called ocean ridges and ocean trenches.

The ocean ridge is a term that is used to describe an underwater mountain system. It consists of various types of mountain ranges. These are like chains of mountains. There are valleys between these mountain peaks and these valleys are called rifts. They run along the spine of the mountains. These ridges are responsible for the spreading of the sea floor. These mountain ranges have active volcanoes that erupt. When the volcanoes erupt magma flows own. The magma cools later and leads to the formation of new ocean bed. The ocean ridges are perhaps the longest mountain ranges in the world. They are deep down inside the ocean. It is unbelievable that the ocean that looks so calm from top will have such a violent sea bed. The experts have done a detailed study of the seabed and they say that the oceanic ridges maybe as long as 80,000 kms.

Facts About The Oceans: Volcanoes Below

Most of the ocean ridges are home to active volcanoes. The ridges are not even. They are created by flowing magma. The seabed is constantly renewing itself. This is exactly why the ocean ridges are created newly almost every day. The Oceanic ridges sometimes will have valleys as deep as ten to twenty kilometers  The terrain of these ridges is rugged. We hope that you have got a certain idea of the ocean ridges by reading this article. You will be surprised to know that the Oceanic ridges were discovered only in the 1950. Before that we did not have much idea about how the ocean beds actually looked like. Since then a lot of ships and special crafts have been sent deep under the oceans to study these Oceanic ridges. These studies have helped us to understand the concept of the Oceanic ridges much better.

Now that you have got a good idea of oceanic ridges we will move on to discussing the ocean trenches. Trenches are the deepest parts of the ocean. If you can enter one you will reach closest to the crust of the earth. They are deep and absolutely dark in this layer you can find a lot of marine life that cannot be imagined in any other parts of the sea. They are long depressions that are found on the sea bed. The biggest ocean trenches in the world is the challenger deep that is located in the marina trench. We have discussed a lot about this ocean trenches in many of our articles.

The ocean trenches are mostly caused near volcanic areas and places where earth quake is common. These ocean trenches can be as deep as 700 kms. As you can understand they are cause by the movement of the seabed. As a result a long gap is created. These look like cracks on the ocean bed. There are many ocean trenches all across the world. The atmospheric pressure that one will experience inside these ocean trenches is very high. It was not until 1950 that the ocean trenches were studied completely.

Longer To Go Deeper

It is strange to even imagine that it too man longer to reach the deepest point on earth than to reach the moon. Many special submarines have gone under the ocean trenches to understand the life and the formation of the ocean trenches better.
The oxygen levels inside the ocean trenches are very low. Yet life survives in various forms in these ocean trenches. Thanks to technology that man could reach the fascinating world under the ocean trenches. The ocean trenches change over time. Some become deeper and some get covered.

We hope that this article on ocean ridges and ocean trenches will help you to understand these ocean facts and geographical features better. They are basically proofs of the violent activities that keep happening under the calm ocean that we can see from top.

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