"Stop that!" Will tried to protect his goldfish from Tish, the family cat.
"Silly cat! Those fish aren't a snack, and I have to study!"
He turned back to his science textbook and yawned.
"This is boring," he murmured, pushing away his homework.
"Isn't the ocean just water anyway? I'm so tired . . ."
Will glanced at the time on his phone, set an alarm for ten minutes later, and crawled into bed.
He immediately fell asleep and started to dream.
Will found himself inside a submarine, floating in the middle of nowhere.
"Wow! Where am I, QT?" he said, picking up his phone.
"My GPS indicates that we're floating in the western Pacific Ocean," QT responded. "See?"
"Wow. That's a lot of water," Will commented.
"Almost three quarters of Earth is covered by water: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern oceans.
But they're connected into one world ocean because water moves all around," QT explained.
Will peered at the map on QT's screen. "The continents seem so small."
"They're bigger than they look," QT said. "Wait a second, and I'll take control of the ship."
A beam of light shot from QT to the submarine's controls, and the ship began moving.
"You can do that? Wow!" Will exclaimed.
"I sure can. Right now we're over a strip around the continents called the continental shelf.
It can extend four hundred kilometers from the coast.
But it's not steep, so the water is usually 140 meters at its deepest."
"Colorful tropical reefs and lots of animals live in this area," Will said, remembering something he had read in his textbook.
"That's right," QT said. "Then the ground gets steeper. We call this section of the continents the continental slope.
It goes all the way to the ocean floor." The submarine descended quickly, startling Will.
"Where are we going?"
"Down!" QT answered. "But I've got to turn on the lights.
Sunlight doesn't penetrate very far into the water.
The top layer of the ocean, the Sunlight Zone, is only two hundred meters deep.
In this zone there's enough light for plants to survive.
The fish and mammals that live here feed on the plants and—"
"Each other?" Will guessed.
"Right. As you go deeper, into the Twilight Zone, it grows dimmer and dimmer—not enough light for plants.
So the creatures that live here usually have huge eyes to help them see.
And they tend to come up to the Sunlight Zone to feed at night, when predators can't see them," QT explained.
"That's where we are now, right? It's pretty dark here."
Then Will noticed something enormous in the distance. "What's that? It's getting closer fast!"
"Uh-oh . . . That's a giant squid. They live here, feeding on fish and smaller squid. It probably thinks we're lunch!"
Just as the giant squid was about to wrap its tentacles around the submarine, QT turned the boat sharply, and they sped away.
"Whew!" said Will.
"As I was saying," QT continued, "by one thousand meters deep, there's no light. That's the start of the Midnight Zone."
Will nodded. "This must be it." Then he spied something surprising. "Lights!"
"Many species have adapted to life without sunlight.
Some create their own light, to attract mates or prey or confuse predators."
QT turned off the lights, and a fish with huge teeth swam by.
It had what looked like a fishing pole coming out of its head, with a light on the top.
"That's weird! What is it?" Will asked.
"An anglerfish. It attracts food with that light."
After the fish swam away, QT flashed the submarine's lights. Thousands of lights flashed back.
Will was amazed. "Wow! That's a lot of anglerfish!"
"And some squid, some shrimplike species, and other creatures. We're approaching the ocean floor now.
The ocean floor starts about four thousand meters below the surface, but it can go as deep as six thousand meters."
QT turned the lights back on, and a vast plain appeared before them. It was dotted with mountains.
"It looks a lot like the land above water; most of it is flat, but there are also mountains and valleys.
Those little mountains are called seamounts. If they become big enough to reach the surface, their name changes to islands."
"Cool!" Will exclaimed. Then he noticed something else.
"What are those tubes, with the black stuff erupting out of them?"
"They're called black smokers," QT said. "They release toxic gases and hot water from underground.
For a long time, people thought nothing could live down here, but they were wrong."
QT shined a bright light near one of the smokers, and they saw fish and crabs swimming among long, white tubes with red tips.
"Those are tubeworms. They actually get their energy from those toxic substances. But let's look behind us too."
As the submarine turned, the ocean floor dropped away.
QT said, "That's the Mariana Trench, a huge valley.
Its deepest part is the Challenger Deep, at 11,000 meters under the surface. But life exists even there. Let's go see."
As they floated over the edge, they heard a creak. Worried, Will asked, "What was that?"
QT ran a safety check of the submarine, and "DANGER!" appeared on the phone's screen.
But QT sounded calm. "Our submarine made that noise.
We are under extreme pressure down here, and the weight of all the water above us is pressing on the boat.
We shouldn't go much deeper. We don't want to get squished and—"
But before QT could finish, the submarine window cracked!
A stream of water shot inside, splashing Will.
He woke with a start and saw the cat jump away from the fishbowl, shaking its wet paw. "Tish! Stay away from that fishbowl!"
Will went to his desk. "Oceans aren't boring. They're awesome!" he thought, quickly filling in a worksheet.
Before long, he crawled back into bed—this time, for the night.