Jackie Court' age 10, of Salt Lake City,~Utah, for his ~question:

How deep is the ocean?

Spin around a globe and look at the blue oceans. They seem to cover a‑great deal of the world, And so they do. About three quarters of 'the world is covered by seas.  The ocean waters rest on deep floors of heavy rock, Only lately have we discovered much about what is at the bottom of the sea.

A lot of people thought the ocean floors were flat and even, Not at all, The floors of the seas are as bumpy and interesting as the dry land. There are hills and mounds. There are undersea volcanoes. There are huge chains of mountains buried far below the surface of the sea,

A map of the ocean floor is put together bit by bit. The depth is measured here and there, generally by echoes. For the oceans are far to deep to be measured with a stone on a, string. Mapping the –ocean floors is a long and tiresome job, It is not nearly finished. Sometimes a deep valley is discovered in the ocean floor. The  deepest so far discovered is in the Pacific Ocean. It is six and one half miles deep,‑ that is six and one half miles below the surface of, the sea. It is deep enough to bury Mt, Everest, the world’s highest mountain, a mile below the waves.

With all these hills and hollows, it is not easy to give an exact depth of the ocean. Here it is only a half mile deep, somewhere else it is four miles deep. What's more, the really deep ocean begins far from land, The big land masses rest on sloping ledges of shallow seas.  The deep ocean begins all of a sudden. The shallow slopes drop down in steep cliffs. Most of the ocean water rests in these deep basins.

We can give an average depth for an ocean. We can say how deep the sea would be if a giant bulldozer leveled off all the floor.. But no two oceans have the same average depth.

The biggest and deepest ocean is the Pacific, Its average depth

is 14,048 feet. If a bulldozer smoothed out the floor of the Pacific It would be over two and three quarter miles deep over.  But points in it are over six miles deep, And in some spots, the ocean pokes up in islands.

The third largest ocean rates second in average depth. This is the Indian Ocean, Its average depth is 13,002 feet ‑ almost two and a half miles. The stormy Atlantic is second in size and third in average depth, Off Puerto Rico is a hole in the ocean floor 30,246 feet below the waves. But the average depth of the Atlantic is 12,880 feet, just over two and a quarter miles. The chilly Arctic Ocean is a shallow one. Its average depth is just about three quarters of a mile.