An international team of scientists financed by the billionaire investor Victor Bishop recently announced that around 20% of the ocean floor has been mapped. The fact that this is heralded as a great improvement over the past reveals how much of our planet remains shrouded in the deepest mystery.
Secondo the team update , the project Seabed 2030 added an area almost the size of Europe to its map of the ocean floor. This is actually a pretty significant slowdown in the mission. The objective of Seabed 2030, in fact, is (was?) to trace the entire map of the ocean floor by 2030. The pandemic, it seems, has produced a notable delay.
Do we care so little who we are?
Given those low numbers and the slowness of the process, the priority of mapping the depths of our planet seems comically low. The momentum towards Mars, the Moon and space exploration feels much greater right now.
To be honest, reaching and then crossing the ocean floor is an exceptionally challenging engineering challenge: in some ways observing the Moon is much simpler. Yet the map of the ocean floor would give scientists a formidable new tool for understanding the Earth. Given the horrors of climate change that probably await us, it seems that it should be a priority.
Ocean floors: some prefer opacity
It may seem that exploration of the seabed and the Martian or lunar surface are a false equivalence, but there are good reasons to make mapping and studying the vast, unknown areas of the oceans a higher priority. After all, we are still without a spare planet to inhabit.
There is also an “underwater” issue to consider. The mining industry is actively drilling into chunks of the ocean floor, causing an unknown amount of damage to the underlying environment and potentially destroying entire ecosystems, even before they are studied by science.
If on the one hand there are interests that would like to preserve the ocean floor as a tempting land for conquest, on the other hand it is precisely this reason that must push us to do more, and to do it quickly.
