Ocean Floor Map

Last updated 11 October 2026

What the map shows

Colors show how deep the water is Bathymetry. The study of the floors of the ocean, lakes and rivers: how deep the water is and the shape of the bottom. Source , from pale blue near the coasts to dark blue in the trenches. Each band is a depth range from the Natural Earth bathymetry. On top are two kinds of plate boundary from the PB2002 model: red mid-ocean ridges Mid-ocean ridge. An underwater mountain range that forms along divergent plate boundaries, where new ocean floor is made. Source , where plates move apart, and dark blue trenches, where one plate sinks under another Subduction zone. Where one plate sinks under another and back into the mantle, usually marked by a deep ocean trench. Source . Dots mark the deepest measured point of each ocean.

The shape of the sea floor

Close to land is a shallow shelf, the palest band. Past it the floor drops away to wide, deep plains, which make up most of the map. The ridges rise from these plains as a single chain that winds through every ocean. The deepest places are not in the middle of the oceans but at their edges, in narrow trenches, most of them around the Pacific.

Key facts

1. The average depth of the ocean is about 3,682 m (12,080 feet). NOAA Ocean Service, How deep is the ocean?
2. The deepest known point is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, measured at 10,924 ±15 m by the Five Deeps Expedition. Bongiovanni, Stewart and Jamieson (2022), Geoscience Data Journal 9(1)
3. On this map, the 4,000 to 5,000 m band covers the most sea floor: 31.2% of the ocean. Depths of 3,000 to 6,000 m together cover 73%.
4. Water less than 200 m deep covers 7.9% of the ocean. Depths beyond 6,000 m cover only 0.66%.
5. The PB2002 plate model maps 67,367 km of spreading ridge and 51,309 km of subduction zone. PB2002 plate model, Bird (2003), converted by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil
6. As of April 2026, 28.7% of the global sea floor had been mapped with modern high-resolution multibeam sonar. NOAA Ocean Service, How much of the ocean have we explored?

How much sea floor lies at each depth

Area of each depth band on the Natural Earth polygons, as a share of the whole ocean (363,345,408 km²).

Data source: Natural Earth 1:10m bathymetry (from SRTM30 Plus), Public domain. Download: Depth GeoJSON , Depth zones CSV .

Deepest point of each ocean

Data source: Bongiovanni, Stewart and Jamieson (2022), Five Deeps Expedition, CC BY 4.0. Download: Deepest points CSV .

More maps

Follow the spreading centers on the mid-ocean ridge map and the sinking plates on the subduction zones map. See every deep trench on the ocean trenches map, zoom in on the Mariana Trench, or read about the Pacific Plate and all tectonic plates.