Science & Technology

We have only glimpsed 0.001% of the bottom of the sea, study claims

By T.K. Randall
May 8, 2025

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) It has often been stated that the bottom of the sea is a vast, unexplored frontier about which we know very little - and now a new study has laid bare the true scale of the problem.

According to researchers from the non-profit Ocean Discovery League, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Boston University, humans have explored less than 0.001% of the ocean floor.

This is equivalent to 3,823 square kilometers (roughly the size of Rhode Island).

Suffice to say, there is a long way to go map the entirety of the Earth's oceans."We have visual records of a minuscule percentage of the deep seafloor, an ecosystem encompassing 66 percent of the surface of planet Earth," the team wrote.

The reality is that we have no idea what might be living in the depths of the ocean - there could be any number of enormous, undiscovered creatures and entire ecosystems we can only dream about.

At a time when a lot of focus has been placed on finding life on other worlds, it's incredible just how little we actually know about what might be living on our own.

According to the research team, it could take 100,000 years to map the entire ocean floor.

"These estimates illustrate that we need a fundamental change in how we explore and study the global deep ocean," they wrote.

Source: Science Alert

Tags: Ocean, Earth