Giant coral towers, vast coral reefs and other formations captivate explorers
Mark Fischetti is a senior editor at Scientific American. He covers all aspects of sustainability. Follow him on Twitter @markfischetti Credit: Nick Higgins
Oceanographers are happy to say that we know more about the surface of the moon than we know about Earth‘s ocean floor. That’s right. In 2017, only 6 percent of the global seafloor had been mapped, usually by ships with sonar instruments sailing back and forth in straight lines across local sections of the ocean.
But since then, countries have become eager to map the seabed in their own “exclusive economic zones,” which extend up to 200 nautical miles from their shores, in part in search of essential minerals that they can scrape off using large mining machines. Another push is Seabed 2030—an effort to map Earth’s entire ocean floor by 2030, jointly run by the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.
Its goal is to compile and unify mappings carried out by governments, industry and research institutions everywhere. The public release of previous private bathymetric data helps to expand the plotted area. And unmanned, remotely operated vehicles equipped with sonar that can glide underwater for days accelerate the pace of mapping. By June 2022, an impressive 21 percent of the world’s ocean floor had been mapped. The more experts mapped, the more surprises they found—like the three unexpected and unusual formations that were revealed here.
This article was originally published under the title “Every Inch of the Seafloor” in Scientific American 327, 2, 40-47 (August 2022)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0822-40
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