| Original photo by Ball Park Brand/ Unsplash |
| Oceans have lakes and rivers. | The Earth's oceans are just as dynamic a landscape as the bits of rock that peek above its surface. Our seas are home to the world's longest mountain chain, its deepest trenches, and other impressive natural structures that boggle the mind. The ocean is even home to its own underwater lakes and rivers. When seawater seeps up from the seafloor, it mixes with the salt layers above and creates a depression in the seabed, where this heavy, dense, and briny mixture rests. Some of these depressions can be more like puddles than proper lakes, stretching only a few feet across, but others can be many miles wide or long, and even feature their own underwater waves. And like lakes and rivers on land, these underwater features also have coastlines and animals that rely on these salty seas within seas to survive.
These aren't the only types of "rivers" found in the world's oceans. Where some of the world's major rivers (including the Amazon and Congo) meet the sea, an underwater current of silt and sand can create massive channels that move more sediment in a few weeks than all the world's regular rivers combined can move in a year. Although these are massive undersea structures, scientists discovered them only 40 years ago with the advent of sonar mapping, and many mysteries still surround them. In fact, some oceanographers have said that we know more about the surface of Mars than the depths of the Earth's oceans, and less than 19% of the ocean floor has been mapped in detail. Which raises the question: What other amazing aquatic wonders have yet to be discovered?
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 | | The oceans contain the vast majority of the world's wildlife. | | |
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| The oceans contain the vast majority of the world's wildlife. |  |  |
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