Humans Have Never Seen 99.999% of the Seafloor, Study Finds, as Trump Greenlights Deep-Sea Mining

We’ve got better visuals of Mars than we do of our own ocean floor—and by a much larger margin than you’d think. A new study in Science Advances crunched the numbers from 43,681 deep-sea dives conducted since 1958 and comes to a mind-blowing conclusion: we’ve visually observed just 0.001% of the deep seafloor. That’s an area just slightly larger than Rhode Island—or about a tenth the size of Belgium—across about 70% of the planet. The average depth of the ocean is 12,080 feet (3,682 meters), making it impossible to visually observe unless you’re Aquaman or have a deep-sea submersible. As of June 2024, 26.1% of the global seafloor has been mapped, according to NOAA, though visual observation is a tougher nut to crack. “This small and biased sample is problematic when attempting to characterize, understand, and manage a global ocean,” said Susan Poulton, a researcher at the Ocean Discovery League and co-author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. Scientists estimate that two-thirds ... Read full article.