Open ocean shark tank (Sep 16th, 2018)

The actual horizontal depth of 17 meters is actually largely obscured from visitors by clever lighting, allowing the sharks to actually "dissapear" into the depth, which does in fact help to give an actual impression of a vast open ocean. The tank doesn't appear to be nearly as horizontally deep as it truly is.

One can really only fully gage the actual size of this tank when viewing it from above behind-the-scenes, during a tour for example. I have had the pleasure of doing that twice and it is quite impressive - the site of the exhibits from above as well as the technical installations and devices is rather impressive. If you get the chance to do a behind-the-scenes tour of the Ocean at Burgers' Zoo I'd say you should take it.