I often see this statistic referenced, but I don’t understand exactly what it means. And why only 5 percent? Is it because of the ocean’s unfathomably massive size? The cost of mapping? It’s not worth mapping? All of the above?
In: Earth Science
The entire ocean floor has been mapped. The 5% is how much has been mapped by modern sonar.
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/world-oceans-day-2015/how-much-of-the-seafloor-is-left-to-explore.html
80% of the ocean is still unexplored.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html#:~:text=More%20than%20eighty%20percent%20of,the%20mysteries%20of%20the%20deep.
As far as I know, depth and the insane degree of pressure is the cause. We have submersibles that do the thing, but they’re super expensive. Just testing out new and improved ones can be extra expensive, especially if they need replacement or repair. Then you probably gotta hire people to deal with it all, then taxes. It’s just a big undertaking and our current technology for mapping the ocean floor is limited.
All the above. Oceans account for far more of the world’s surface than land, and their sheer vastness and isolation makes it prohibitively expensive to map them with very little tangible benefit.
About 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. The Pacific and Atlantic oceans alone account for 50% of the Earth’s surface.
We’ve mapped that surface water pretty well. We know where the coastlines are. We know where the ocean currents run. We know where dangerous reefs, rock formations and sand bars are etc.
It’s the depths like the ocean floor, underwater mountains and crevasses that we haven’t mapped much so far.
Mapping the Earth has mostly been done for human benefits. To help exploration, travel, transport and exploitation of the Earth. That’s why we’re pretty familiar with the parts of the ocean that we actively journey across.
We don’t really travel the ocean floor though and that’s why it was never really worth the effort to do so. Especially since the deep ocean is an incredibly hostile place to be for us. The depths bring challenges like corrosive saltwater, extreme pressure, darkness and cold.
Those factors make deep ocean exploration expensive and dangerous, so why bother?
We’re slowly changing our minds on that because we’ve pretty much exploited the land for any easily reachable resources already. That means that mining and exploitation on land is also getting riskier and more expensive as we have to mine deeper and more comprehensively to get what we want.
Meanwhile, we’re finding an increasing need to do work in the ocean. Whether it’s for laying down communication and powerlines through the ocean or exploitation for resources. Our technology is improving too, which means that exploitation efforts that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive are slowly becoming worth considering.
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