Pelagic Archives

Descend at your own pace.

This record plays a low ambient drone that thickens and darkens with depth. Turn your sound on for the full descent, or enter silently.

Depth
0m
Pressure
1atm
Now entering Epipelagic — Sunlight Zone
Field Record No. 001 — Open Ocean

Eleven thousand meters down.

Pelagic Archives is a living record of the water column — from the sunlit surface where ninety percent of ocean life gathers, to the crushing dark of the hadal trenches few vessels have ever reached. Scroll to descend; the light, the color and the sound follow you down.

5 Pelagic Zones 10,935 M Depth Range Araf Studio — Creating Future
Descend
010 – 200 M

Epipelagic
Sunlight Zone

Sunlight penetrates far enough here for photosynthesis, so this thin surface layer holds the ocean's densest life — phytoplankton blooms that anchor the entire marine food web, migratory tuna, sharks, sea turtles and nearly every reef system on Earth.

  • Phytoplankton in this layer produce a large share of the planet's oxygen, on par with land forests.
  • Water pressure at the base of this zone is roughly 20 times what we feel at sea level.
  • Most commercial fisheries operate entirely within this band.
02200 – 1,000 M

Mesopelagic
Twilight Zone

Sunlight fades to a dim blue haze and then to nothing. This is where bioluminescence takes over as the primary language of the ocean — lanternfish, hatchetfish and siphonophores flicker signals for hunting, hiding and courtship in perpetual dusk.

  • An estimated 90% of deep-sea animals are believed to produce their own light.
  • The largest animal migration on the planet happens here nightly, as twilight-zone life rises toward the surface to feed under cover of dark.
  • Giant squid have most often been recorded near the lower edge of this zone.
031,000 – 4,000 M

Bathypelagic
Midnight Zone

No sunlight reaches this far — every glow here is biological. Water temperature settles just above freezing, and animals adapt with slow metabolisms, huge mouths and elastic stomachs built for meals that may not come again for weeks.

  • Sperm whales are known to dive into this zone, holding their breath for over an hour while hunting squid.
  • Anglerfish here lure prey with a bioluminescent filament grown directly from their skull.
  • Temperatures typically sit between 4°C near the top and close to freezing at the base.
044,000 – 6,000 M

Abyssopelagic
Abyssal Zone

This layer blankets most of the world's ocean floor — vast plains of fine sediment broken by hydrothermal vents, where entire ecosystems run not on sunlight but on chemical energy rising from the Earth's crust.

  • Hydrothermal vent communities were only discovered in 1977, near the Galápagos Rift.
  • Sediment here can take thousands of years to accumulate a single centimeter.
  • Pressure at this depth exceeds 400 atmospheres — enough to compress the air in an unprotected vessel to a fraction of its volume.
056,000 – 10,935 M

Hadopelagic
Hadal Zone

Named for Hades, this zone exists almost entirely inside ocean trenches — narrow fractures where one tectonic plate slides beneath another. The Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep, its lowest known point, sits roughly 10,935 meters down.

  • Pressure at Challenger Deep is estimated near 1,086 atmospheres — over a thousand times surface pressure.
  • Only a handful of crewed and uncrewed vehicles have ever reached the trench floor.
  • Amphipods and sea cucumbers are among the few animals confirmed living at full hadal depth.
Live Data — Ocean Biodiversity Information System

The Field Archive

Real specimen records pulled live from OBIS, the international marine biodiversity database. Pick a zone to pull records logged at that depth.

0 – 200 m

Live records via OBIS — Ocean Biodiversity Information System (api.obis.org). Contributor-licensed occurrence data, not affiliated with Araf Studio.

The Archive

Expedition Log

A short chronology of the dives, vessels and people who pushed the record of how far down we've actually looked.

  1. 1960

    Trieste

    Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh became the first people to reach Challenger Deep aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste, a dive that remained the deepest crewed descent on record for over half a century.

  2. 1964

    DSV Alvin

    Commissioned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Alvin became one of the most active deep-sea submersibles ever built, later locating the wreck of the Titanic in 1986 and surveying hydrothermal vent fields across multiple oceans.

  3. 1977

    Galápagos Rift Vents

    Scientists aboard Alvin discovered thriving communities around hydrothermal vents, overturning the assumption that all deep-sea life ultimately depends on sunlight.

  4. 2009–2014

    Nereus

    A hybrid remotely operated vehicle built to reach hadal depths, Nereus surveyed the Mariana Trench before it was lost under pressure near the Kermadec Trench in 2014.

  5. 2018–2019

    Five Deeps Expedition

    Victor Vescovo piloted the submersible Limiting Factor to the deepest point of all five oceans in a single expedition, including a return to Challenger Deep with updated instrumentation.

  6. Ongoing

    Seafloor Mapping

    International mapping initiatives continue building a complete high-resolution map of the ocean floor — by most public estimates, still less than a quarter finished today.