Ocean Floor Mapping Closer to Mars, Yet Vast Depths Remain Untouched
Seabed 2030 has lifted global ocean-floor mapping from 6% to about 28.7% since 2017, but roughly 71% of the seabed remains unmapped due to the physics, cost, and logistics of deep-sea surveying. Unlike Mars, which is mapped from orbit, the ocean floor requires costly multibeam sonar on ships and is hampered by under-ice conditions, depth, and access. Advances such as autonomous vessels and machine learning could accelerate progress, but meeting a 100% target by 2030 is unlikely; nonetheless, the improved bathymetry underpins better climate models, submarine-cable routing, tsunami prediction, and environmental baselining for deep-sea mining, while remaining uneven and most challenging in deep, remote regions.