Top 10 oceans facts

Water salinity. Launched June 10, 2011, Aquarius is NASA’s first satellite instrument specifically designed to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. The complete first year dataset of NASA's Aquarius instrument reveals seasonal changes in the Amazon River's plume. Depending on the prevailing currents, the river's freshwater outflow heads east toward Africa or bends up north to the Caribbean.

Of mostly organic detritus falling from the upper layers of the water . IMarine snow refers to organic particulate matter that constantly falls from the upper waters into the deeper waters of the ocean. Marine snow serves to provide food and energy from the productive upper waters exposed to sunlight to the marine organisms that reside in the deeper regions of the water column. The content and abundance of marine snow varies seasonally and with variations in ocean currents.

Vasco de Balboa. Spanish explorer Balboa was the first European to sight the Pacific from America in 1513 after his expedition crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached a new ocean. He named it Mar del Sur (literally, "South Sea") because the ocean was to the south of the coast of the isthmus where he first observed the Pacific. Later, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan called the ocean Pacífico (or "Pacific" meaning, "peaceful") because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Cape Horn, the expedition found calm waters.

In a clear sky. A white squall is a sudden and violent windstorm at sea which is not accompanied by the black clouds generally characteristic of a squall. The name refers to the white-capped waves and broken water, its meager warning to any unlucky seaman caught in its path. A white squall was allegedly behind the sinking of the brigantine Albatross on May 2, 1961.

Challenger Deep. The Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the Earth's seabed hydrosphere, with a depth of 10,898 to 10,916 m by direct measurement from submersibles, and slightly more by sonar bathymetry. It is in the Pacific Ocean, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands group. The Challenger Deep is a relatively small slot-shaped depression in the bottom of a considerably larger crescent-shaped oceanic trench.

James Cameron. Cameron became an expert on deep-sea exploration in conjunction with his research and underwater filming for The Abyss and Titanic. On March 7, 2012, he took the Deepsea Challenger submersible to the bottom of the New Britain Trench. On March 26, he reached the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, and spent over 3 hours exploring the ocean floor before returning to the surface

Red Sea. The Red Sea is very saline due to high evaporation, very little precipitation, almost no river inflow and isolation from the rest of the Indian Ocean. Salinity reaches 41 ‰ in the northern part (Average for the world's seawater is ~35 ‰).

1958. The first nautical transit of the North Pole was made in 1958 by the submarine USS Nautilus, and the first surface nautical transit occurred in 1977 by the icebreaker NS Arktika.

Indian Ocean. Two large circular currents, one in the northern hemisphere flowing clockwise and one south of the equator moving anticlockwise, constitute the dominant flow pattern. During the winter monsoon, however, currents in the north are reversed

Post-glacial. Sable Island is believed to have formed from a terminal moraine deposited on the continental shelf near the end of the last Ice Age. It emerges from vast shoals and shallows which, in tandem with frequent fog and sudden storms, have caused over 350 recorded shipwrecks