The Deep Sea

What it is

The Deep Sea is a single web page that you scroll from the surface of the ocean to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. A depth counter runs as you go, and sea creatures appear at the depths where they actually live: manatees and sea turtles near the top, anglerfish and vampire squid in the dark, a snailfish thousands of meters down, and at the very bottom a short story that is worth the whole trip.

How to play

Scroll. That is the whole instruction. Swipe on a phone or use the wheel on a computer, and keep going long after it feels like it should have ended. Fact cards appear on the way down, from the deepest scuba dive ever made at 332 meters to the resting place of the Titanic at 3,800 meters. The zones are labeled as you pass through them: sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyssal, hadal. Keep going until the page tells you there is nothing below.

What makes it different

Numbers about the ocean do not land. Eleven thousand meters is just a figure until you have dragged your thumb through every one of them and watched the animals thin out and turn strange. The page never speeds up to spare you, and that is the point. Somewhere in the dark the page puts your progress in terms you can picture, and that is when most people realize how much further there is to go.

Why it is on Bored

Pages that make you say out loud what you just learned are rare, and this one has been doing it since 2019. It is the best argument we know for the long scroll as a storytelling format.

Tips

• Read the cards, the creature facts are short and mostly astonishing
• Look for the human on the way down, it puts everything after it in scale
• Do not skip ahead, the emptiness in the lower zones is part of the effect
• The last stretch is text only, and worth reading to the end

FAQ