Water covers most of our planet's surface, but we have mapped only a tiny fraction of our oceans. Meanwhile, the deep ocean floor remains even more mysterious, despite its current and potential benefits to humankind. If you had to make an intuitive guess, what percentage of the deep ocean floor do you think humankind has explored? Got a number in your mind? The odds are that you have vastly overestimated humankind’s accomplishments. Recent research has revealed just how little humankind has achieved in exploring beneath the waves. A study has found that humans have visually observed less than 0.001% of the deep ocean, which leaves 99.999% of the deep seafloor unexplored. The same study worked out how long it would take to see the rest just once, even with greater than today's capacity, and that number is worse than the percentage. The question is, why? Why is ocean exploration so underdeveloped despite its potential to help humankind? The answer is not only money. The dives that have happened were made by a handful of countries looking at a handful of places, and the ones being made now have been getting shallower every decade since the 1960s. What follows is what the data shows, why it is biased in a way that matters, and the one change two marine scientists say would fix it. NOAA Ocean Exploration, 2025 Beyond the Blue We need to clarify a few things so we’re all on the same page. Sonar mapping and visual exploration and observation are related but not the same thing. The former is easier than the latter because pressure, darkness, corrosive saltwater, and freezing temperatures put immense strain on tech and tools. However, visual imaging is critical for studying the deep seafloor because it provides situational context to collected samples. It also lets researchers observe marine life behaviors and interactions, conduct more accurate biodiversity surveys, and gather biological and geological data. Meanwhile, how deep you dive and where you do this on the globe matters, too, not just how often you conduct exploratory scientific missions. Currently, 28.7% of the world’s ocean floor has been mapped. According to the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project’s most recent data, almost 5 million square kilometers of data have been added over the past year. This might sound like a lot, and it is. And recent mapping efforts are a positive scientific development. However, it is still shocking how little we’ve explored the ocean, considering that water makes up around 71% of our planet’s surface. Meanwhile, Earth’s oceans contain the vast majority—96.5%—of our planet’s water. Furthermore, 66% of our entire planet is deep ocean, i.e., 200 meters or deeper. So, if humankind truly wants to understand its home planet, it cannot ignore in-depth exploration of the ocean floor. And yet, as we’ve mentioned above, we have visually observed less than 0.001% of the deep ocean. bunnyhop / magnific (not the actual photo) Researcher Katherine L. C. Bell and her team emphasize that humankind has imaged a “minuscule fraction” of the deep seafloor, despite the importance of visual observation in the ocean. The 0.001% that we’ve observed is equal to a mere tenth of the size of Belgium. Another issue is that the information researchers gather is very limited because of bias. “Data gathered from approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives indicate that we have also seen an incredibly biased sample. Sixty-five percent of all in situ visual seafloor observations in our dataset were within 200 nm of only three countries: the United States, Japan, and New Zealand.” Furthermore, a whopping 97% of all dives the researchers compiled were conducted by just 5 countries: the US, Japan, New Zealand, France, and Germany. So, the data sample is both tiny and very biased. This, in turn, affects humankind’s attempts to characterize, understand, and manage the global ocean ecosystem. According to the researchers, the pace of deep ocean exploration and observation is also very slow. “If there were an increase in observing capacity to 1,000 platforms operating worldwide, visually covering the seafloor at the current rate of ~3 km2 per year per system, it would take more than 100,000 years to visualize the seafloor once.” To emphasize, this is how long it would take to visualize the ocean floor just a single time. You need constant monitoring to understand how the biome changes over time. In a nutshell, what this means is that humankind needs to fundamentally change how it explores and studies the global deep ocean. It is ludicrously expensive to organize deep dives and gather data. You need vast resources and high-tech tools that can withstand intense physical challenges. And because only a handful of countries around the world have the willingness and resources to organize dives, this naturally affects research objectives. If you’re paying vast sums of money for your mission, why wouldn’t you do what you want, not what someone else tells you to? The upside is that since the 2000s, there has been “a notable increase in the number of dives conducted worldwide and the number of countries and institutions carrying out deep-sea exploration and research,” according to Bell and her colleagues. The hope is that there will be a more equitable collection of global deep-sea data “as technology advances and deep-sea tools become smaller, more affordable, easier to use, and more autonomous.” So, if you want unbiased and broad data sets about the deep seafloor, you need to aim for the proliferation of cheap(er) technology on a global scale. There’s no other way. Vectortradition / magnific (not the actual photo) The ocean affects your life more than you think. Because it's so vast and extensive, the deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth. Understanding it can help us preserve it. What’s more, the ocean provides us with vital services and resources that would be ludicrous to ignore. The deep ocean provides critical benefits both for us, human beings, and the entire planet, from oxygen generation and climate regulation to food and pharmaceuticals. For instance, the upwelling of cold and nutrient-rich deep waters feeds phytoplankton, which in turn produce around 80% of the planet’s oxygen. Furthermore, the carbon transported and stored in the deep sea helps regulate climate. Meanwhile, every year, the ocean supplies 200 million tons of fish and seafood. This feeds roughly a fifth of the global population, while also employing 60 million people worldwide. Another benefit comes from the marine life we’ve discovered. Marine discoveries have enormous potential to create treatments to fight illnesses. The chemical compounds discovered in marine organisms, like sponges, sea hares, sea squirts, and bacteria, have the potential for medical use, including for their anticancer, antibacterial, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, and antiviral properties. Paris Bilal / Unsplash (not the actual photo) Using incredibly limited data to draw definitive conclusions about a biome as vast as the ocean is ridiculous. As the BBC points out, the number of dives per year in recent decades has increased. That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that these dives have been going “ever shallower.” “Back in the 1960s, more than half of the dives went deeper than 2km down (around 1.2 miles). But by the 2010s, only a quarter of dives were going that far beneath the waves. And that’s a big problem because the majority of the ocean (around 75 per cent) lies between 2km and 6km below sea level (1.2 to 3.7 miles),” the BBC explains. As things stand right now, most of the world’s countries are not involved in deep ocean exploration. Furthermore, most seafloor regions are both unseen and unknown. Efforts are underway to make deep-sea tools more accessible and less expensive, and to direct dives toward “lesser-known sites” around the world. However, we’re not quite there yet. It is, perhaps, a question of priorities, values, and resource allocation. A different mindset is what’s needed for the sake of rapid innovation in underwater exploration technology. Frame Studios / magnific (not the actual photo) “We're spending a lot of money to try to understand other planets, maybe planets outside of our solar system. And yet right here on our own planet, we know so little of what's going on in this area that covers about two-thirds of our planet,” geologist and deep-sea expert Jeffrey Karson, of Syracuse University, told NPR. “Almost every time we go there, we learn something new and exciting, and many of our discoveries on the seafloor have been serendipitous. So, you know, we're feeling our way in the dark, literally, there.” Meanwhile, marine biologist Jon Copley, of the University of Southampton, noted that the key is to focus on advancements in tech. “If I were a billionaire philanthropist and I wanted to make a real dent in exploring the ocean, then rather than building a kind of superyacht research ship, I would fully back the development and growth of these kinds of low-cost platforms,” he said. “It's always great to go and see what's over the next rise, what's just out of sight of your pool of light from your deep diving vehicle. But there is, of course, an important need to go back to the same place again and again to see how things change over time.” At the end of the day, without cheap, accessible tech and tools, the ocean will remain a vast, mysterious biome that curious but underfunded researchers barely chip away at. But you won’t get the necessary tech developments—which help democratize navigating the crushing pressure, freezing temperatures, saltwater, and darkness—without the right investments and resources. To get those, you need to change how people—especially those with the influence and deep pockets to drive change—view the Earth’s largest ecosystem. Specifically, its vast capacity to accelerate humankind’s progress, while also helping us understand the planet so we can better protect it. Knowledge is power. It would be foolish to ignore the potential lurking in the depths and to remain blind to what’s happening beneath the waves on our home planet.
