The Atlantic Ocean is the no. 2nd contiguous open water surface on earth. It has a huge, 29,637,900 square mile (76,762,000 square km) area and 12,88 square feet (3,926 square meters) average depth. The Atlantic Ocean’s greatest known depth is 30,246 feet (9,219 meters), which can be found at Puerto Rico Trench.
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world’s five oceans (after the Pacific Ocean, but larger than the Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean). The Kiel Canal (Germany), Oresund (Denmark-Sweden), Bosporus (Turkey), Strait of Gibraltar (Morocco-Spain), and the Saint Lawrence Seaway (Canada-US) are important strategic access waterways.
The International Hydrographic Organization’s decision to delimit a fifth world ocean, the Southern Ocean, removed the Atlantic Ocean’s portion south of 60 degrees south latitude.
Oceans and shallow seas cover more than two-thirds of the planet, to an average depth of 2½ miles / 3.8 km. The Pacific Ocean alone covers nearly half the globe. The oceans contain about 320 million cubic miles / 1,330 million cubic km of salty seawater, accounting for 97 percent of the water on Earth. Most of this water forms a dark, cold realm deep below the surface, where life is scarce, but the shallow, sunlit waters of coastal seas are some of the world’s richest wildlife habitats.