May 9, 2025—We've only seen a shockingly small percentage of Earth's ocean floor. Plus, the sun may be entering its strong era; and we visit the nation's only particle collider.
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO/S. Wiessinger
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This heatmap shows the concentration of known deep-sea dives with visual observations in the North Atlantic. Ocean Discovery League
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We’ve only managed to directly see a mere 0.001 percent of the deep sea floor, according to a report based on 43,681 records from submersible expeditions conducted around the world, each to a minimum of 200 meters (about 656 feet). That’s a shockingly tiny amount, about the same area as that of Rhode Island. Comparatively, we’ve obtained high-resolution images of practically all the surfaces of the moon and Mars.
What this means: Using altimeters on satellites or sonar technology, scientists have devised clever ways to circumvent kilometers of cold, crushingly pressurized waters to indirectly model the sea floor. Plus, there’s more to exploration than just “seeing” an environment. Three elements—visual imaging, terrain mapping and physical sampling—constitute fully exploring an unknown environment. That said, there are still smaller details that coarser-grained mapping or sampling might otherwise miss. For example, it was through deep-sea cameras that we were able to learn about hydrothermal vents—a discovery that showed organisms could flourish even in the ocean’s darkest places.
What could happen: “The ocean bottom, we know, is very complex,” says Mathieu Lapôtre, a geophysicist at Stanford University. “It has all these features that are fascinating for many reasons—for example, the origins of life, plate tectonics, and the subduction zones and all those things—it’s a complex terrain. And right now, we’re missing a lot of that complexity.” Exploration of the remaining 99.999 percent of the deep ocean is "really going to give us an amazing opportunity to ask new questions we’d never even thought of before,” says Katy Croff Bell, study lead author and president of the Ocean Discovery League. —Gayoung Lee, news intern
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