Name: Does Pressure Keep the Deep Ocean From Freezing?
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T10:45:46.000Z
Duration: 1 min 41 s
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Does pressure keep the deep ocean from freezing?

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But you were probably hoping for a more in-depth answer.

So, let's take a deep dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Down here, there's 11 kilometers of water pressing down on you from above, and the weight of all that water generates around a thousand times atmospheric pressure.

Like, you only need 500 times atmospheric pressure to melt ice down to -4 degrees Celsius.

And if you have a thousand times atmospheric pressure, like at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, then you'll melt ice down to around -9 Celsius.

For salty seawater, everything more or less gets shifted colder.

On the ocean's surface, salt water doesn't freeze until around 2 degrees Celsius below zero.

At 500 times atmospheric pressure, salt water doesn't freeze until around 6 degrees Celsius below zero, and at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, salt water wouldn't freeze until around 11 degrees below zero.

But for various reasons related to circulation and salinity and convection, and the fact salt water freezes into fresh water ice.

For complicated reasons, deep ocean water is often around 0 to 4 degrees Celsius, and doesn't really get much colder than two below zero.

These are temperatures at which the water would stay liquid from salt alone.

Even without the additional pressure, so while pressure could in principle keep the ocean from freezing, it doesn't really get a chance.