The Earth's oceans and seas cover about 71% of the planet's surface.

The total area of the oceans is 361 million sq km (139 million sq miles), while the total area of land is just 149 million sq km (57 million sq miles).

The deepest of the ocean is in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, which reaches a depth of about 11 km (7 miles) at its deepest point.

With so much to explore and the restrictions created by the surface pressure in the deep oceans, humans have barely scratched the surface of understanding the world below the waves.

Those whose lives are intertwined with the world's oceans have seen things landlubbers never will.

Beautiful things.

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Deadly things.

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WTF is that‽‽‽ things.

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Reddit user Itsyourcamila asked:

"For those who spend long periods of time at sea for work, what’s the eeriest thing you’ve ever encountered out on the water?"

Flipper

"Doing an underway replenishment—(UNREP) is a method used by the US Navy to transfer supplies between ships while they are both underway."

"There was a standing wave about 15-20 feet tall between the two ships."

"Dolphins were jumping out of the top of the wave and flipping and twirling in the air."

"Kept expecting one to land on the deck."

~ No-Term-1979

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Bend Me, Shape Me

"I once took a long passage on a merchant ship."

"Watching a corridor below decks twist and bend as the ship—that looks so solid in port—is tossed by waves, is definitely up there."

"Like this video."

~ PRC_Spy

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It's Full Of Stars

"Running dark on a ship in the middle of the ocean. You could look any direction, besides down, and see stars."

"Couldn't see my hand an inch from my face, but could see stars that looked to be just above the water on the horizon. It was like a dome of stars."

"It made me feel very small and insignificant."

~ XN28thePOS

Oops?

"During the mid 90s, we were doing very slow survey lines in the Mediterranean—1.5 knots with absolutely nothing around us or on the radar—when a flare went off directly in front of us."

"Found out later that it was a submarine that had kindly included us in their war games—we're not a military vessel—and was letting us know that we were 'dead'."

~ capty26

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How Sea Monsters Happen

"I saw something that appeared very serpentine and very huge, undulating in the waves of our wake on a very dark, cloudy night en route from Florida to NYC."

"It was glowing faintly green just underneath the surface and appeared to be some sort of huge fat snake swimming alongside us with a 1.5 foot diameter body. It was mesmerizing as I was trying to rationalize what I was looking at."

"Later, I realized it was just a dolphin playing in our wake, whose undulating body and wake were lit up by bioluminescent plankton."

~ only_1_

Glow Up

"Seeing bioluminescent waves at night that make the water glow like something out of a sci-fi movie."

"It’s both beautiful and unsettling."

~ Maryanaxoxo

"Had a night like that while tied off to a buoy in the Gulf of México."

"While on watch, spotted a huge manta ray passing just in front of our bow. He had a glowing wingspan of at least 15 feet."

~ pezgringo

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Fire In The Sky

"Standing on the bridge watching the Mediterranean in 1996, probably 50 miles north of Tunisia, 2:00 a.m. when something came down from the sky in a streak and exploded, and it was absolute daylight for a few seconds."

"Bright enough that we were seriously concerned that a nuclear explosion had happened. Probably just a big meteorite or something exploding, but it was something to see."

~ capty26

La Lune

"I was on a night dive. It was a dive site I was familiar with and as is common practice, the captain had fixed a steady strobe light to the anchor line of the boat so we could find our way back."

"As I was readying to complete my dive and ascend, I wondered why the strobe was no longer blinking and was now just a steady beam. Looking at my compass, I was doubly confused by how I had gotten my navigation so wrong."

"I felt foolish—had I been cocky and overexcited because I was comfortable with this site? How could I have miscalculated my direction so? It’s a dangerous mistake at any time for a diver, much more so at night."

"But as I was ascending, the brightness of the light really irked me. Why would the captain change the strobe on us? Was something wrong?"

"Then it hit me."

"I wasn’t swimming toward the boat at all. I was swimming toward the moon. The water was so clear and calm, I had mistaken it for a light."

"Luckily I hadn’t ascended fully and wasn’t too far off. I was able to redirect to my original navigation, eventually finding the strobe, the boat, and a renewed respect for the ocean’s ability to make you second guess yourself."

~ NJshore_77

Squid Games

"Scuba diving in Grand Cayman in May 2022, on my first checkout dive off the boat, 10 minutes in at 25 feet deep (bottom was 40 feet), had an enormous school of reef squid that was moving towards us."

"I was just hovering in place, and before you know it, I had this entire school of squid swimming around me in a large circle. We estimate there must have been 1500-2000 of them."

"They swam around me for almost 2 minutes, then all at the same time turned and swam off out of sight."

"It was by far, the most bizarre thing I have ever experienced."

~ PDXracer

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Ice Sounds

"We—Navy submarine—were under the polar ice cap and the ice sheet moans all the time. Like what you think a mermaid siren would sound like."

"And sometimes you can hear it through the hull. For about 65 days straight."

"Non-Stop."

"The North Pole is absolutely the quietest place you can ever be and in November it has this fog that's always thery.oYou can't tell how far anything is away."

"It gets very unnerving after a while."

~ monkeywelder

Without A Trace

"We responded to a sailboat that was taking on water. It became clear that the sailboat wasn't going to make it, so we brought the crew of the sailboat onto our vessel and then we sort of waited around and watched the sailboat sink."

"What struck me is how silent it was. No fuss. No drama."

"It wasn't like a dark and stormy night or anything—it was a picture-perfect day. Glassy ocean with not a cloud in the sky and it didn't matter."

"It was the kind of day that most seafarers dream about and yet these blokes had been in a fight for their lives trying to keep their boat afloat."

"After it sank, there were a few bubbles and then that was it. You'd have never known there was ever a sailboat there. Just a beautiful day without a trace of struggle."

"Sailboat? What sailboat? Around here? I didn't see a sailboat."

~ WatchTheBoom

Who's There?

"We—Navy submarine—were cruising in the Bahamas one night in the Devil's Triangle. All the sudden we hear this chain dragging down the hull for like a minute."

"Just scraping."

"It was unnerving."

"And it was in the Exhuma Sound, which is like thousands of feet deep. Which means it would have been floating and hanging off the bottom of something like an old mine drifting for years."

"We came about to try and find it, but we could never find it again—it just disappeared."

~ monkeywelder

Aliens Among Us 🦑

"Weirdest thing I've seen by far was coming out of a fog bank and seeing thousands of giant Humboldt squid with their tentacles waving in the air."

"It was sureal and something I will never forget."

"Like a bunch of aliens."

~ woolybuggered

"Deadly ones at that! Pack hunters."

"The more I read about squid, the more terrifying they become for real."

~ KwisatzHaterach

* The Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), also known as jumbo squid or jumbo flying squid, and Pota in Peru or Jibia in Chile, is a large, predatory squid living in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Humboldt squid typically reach a mantle length of 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in), making the species the largest member of its family.

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Closure

"A dead body floating in the water. Several hundred nautical miles out. He was probably a fisherman."

"The crew got the body into a stretcher, double bagged it, kept it in the freezer, and turned it over to the local authorities at the next port visit. I had a role in all that."

"It was in an advanced state of decomposition, but there was enough remaining to get an identification by dental records. Some family finally got closure."

~ doublestitch

Who's Afraid Of The Dark?

"The churning chaos of sealife you can attract just by shining a light in the water at night."

~ Alysma

"I went night snorkeling in Jamaica—fun at first, but got out too far and started to see big things, noped right out there."

"Out there is the mostly dark, just hearing the sound of your own breathing, and then something large brushes up against you."

"I learned to be afraid of the ocean that night."

~ beaucoup_dinky_dau

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Night diving?

That's a big NOPE for me.

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What's the eeriest thing you've encountered on or in the water?

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