Unveiling the Secrets of the Seafloor

THE SEABED 2030 INITIATIVE TO MAP THE ENTIRE OCEAN FLOOR BY THE END OF THE DECADE

- Bill Gourgey

More of the United States lies beneath the ocean than above it. No, that's not because global warming has caused sea levels to rise catastrophically. That's the way it has been since long before the country was known as the United States. What's more, this Submerged America, as it's sometimes called, is not some forsaken place. It's filled with vibrant animals, gardens, forests, mountains, volcanoes, mesas, and canyons.

The United States' Exclusive Economic Zone extends its borders well into the ocean. It surrounds US lands from American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean and Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to the Atlantic seaboard in the east and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea. Only a fraction of Submerged America has been explored by humans; just half has been mapped using sonar. We have better and more complete images of Mars, Venus, and the Moon. In fact, less than a quarter of the world's ocean floor has been mapped using sonar. This technology does an excellent job at revealing what lies beneath our planet's watery veil. And thanks to an initiative launched in 2017, the secrets hidden on the seafloor may soon be discovered.

The Ocean Decade

Seabed 2030 is an international effort to map the world's seafloor by the year 2030. It aims to fulfill one of the 10 global challenges set out by the United Nations in 2017. The UN declared the 2020s the "Ocean Decade." One objective is to create an ocean map that provides information "for exploring, discovering, and visualizing past, current, and future ocean conditions."

Such a map couldn't come soon enough. Between climate change, microplastic pollution, and companies clamoring to begin deepsea mining for rare metals, knowing what the seafloor looks like now is critical. A map will help us understand how the sea is changing and how such changes might affect people.