What do we really know about the deep ocean? Whether Earth’s ocean is an ecological paradise teeming with wildlife or a mysterious, stormy underworld hiding mythological sea monsters, it goes without saying that our ignorance of the aqueous abyss has shaped our perception of what could exist there. But in terms of actually tallying up what we do know about the deep seafloor, establishing certainty has been elusive.
“In scientific papers, some people [said] we’ve explored 5 percent or 10 percent or 1 percent [of the deep ocean]—and there was no consensus,” says Katy Croff Bell, a marine scientist and founder of the Ocean Discovery League. She wondered “Has anybody actually calculated this?” Bell adds. “And I couldn’t find anything. So I started to do just initial estimates about four or five years ago, and the numbers seemed ridiculously small: 0.001 percent [visited and explored] over almost [the past] 70 years.”
That couldn’t be right, Bell remembers thinking. But follow-up investigations confirmed her suspicions that we humans indeed had only directly observed less than 0.001 percent of the global seafloor—a total area that is about the same as that of Rhode Island. That’s a shockingly tiny amount, considering we’ve now managed to obtain high-resolution images of practically all of the surfaces of the moon and Mars.
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