Giant coral towers, vast reefs and other formations are fascinating 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 like to say that we know more about the moon’s surface than we do about the Earth’s seafloor. It’s true. As of 2017, only 6 percent of the global seafloor had been mapped, mostly by ships with sonar instruments sailing back and forth in straight lines over a local part of the sea.
But since then, nations have become eager to map the seafloor within their own “exclusive economic zones,” extending 200 nautical miles from their shores, in part to search for crucial minerals they can scrape up using large mining machinery. The other push is Seabed 2030 — an effort to map Earth’s entire seafloor by 2030, jointly run by the Nippon Foundation and the nonprofit General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.
The goal is to collect and merge maps created by governments, industries and research institutions around the world. Public release of previously private bathymetric data helps broaden the expanded areas. And unmanned, remotely operated vehicles equipped with sonar that can zoom around underwater for days are accelerating the pace of mapping. By June 2022, an impressive 21 percent of the world’s seafloor had been mapped. The more experts map, the more surprises they’ll find, like the three unexpected, unusual formations revealed here.
This article was originally published with the title “Every Inch of the Seafloor” in 327, 2, 40-47 (August 2022)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0822-40
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