99.999%: This Is How Much Of The Ocean Floor Humans Still Haven’t Seen, And Here’s Why

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.