Mark Grasso, age 9, of Trumbull, Connecticut, for his question:

How deep is the Arctic Ocean?

The Arctic is the baby of the world's oceans. The great Pacific could swallow it a dozen times and dunk its floating chunks of ice almost two miles below the waves. The stormy Atlantic could engulf almost six Arctic Sized oceans. The Indian Ocean could engulf more than five. We measure the precise size of an ocean in two ways. We use square miles to measure the area covered by its wavy surface. We use feet to measure the distance from the surface waves to the solid sea bed at the bottom.

The area of the Arctic Ocean is 5,440,000 square miles. This is more than half the size of North America    and 1,000 times larger than the whole state of Connecticut. If the floor of the Arctic were level, its depth would be 5,010 feet    or 270 feet short of one mile. But parts of its bumpy floor plunge down below the average depth. The deepest dip known is 17,880 feet    which is more than 3 1/4 miles below the icy Arctic waves.