Our Unmapped Ocean

If you took a flight from New York to Beijing, for 1,400 miles of it, you’d be flying over mostly unmapped ocean. We don’t know exactly how deep it is. We don’t know the shape of the ocean floor. It’s a mystery. In fact, we don’t understand the vast majority of the seafloor. Our maps of the moon, Mars, and even Venus are 50 times more detailed. Near the coasts and continental shelves, where waters are shallow and boat traffic is high, we’ve used sonar from ships to build high-resolution seafloor maps. But these cover just 10% of the ocean. The rest, with an average depth of 2.5 miles, is too deep for ordinary sonar, and too remote and dark for other types of visual mapping. So we’ve resorted to measuring the ocean surface with satellites, then interpreting the seafloor from that. The best resolution we’ve been able to manage is a data point every 3 miles. Exactly what’s happening between these points? We have little idea. And this is a bit of a problem. The contours of the seafloor shape the paths of tsunamis and the direction of major currents that shape our weather. When a cargo ship or a jetliner goes missing, we struggle to locate them. Who knows what we might discover with a better knowledge of the deep ocean. New minerals and resources. New life forms. Things so new we can’t even imagine them.