Quest to map seabed

At Stake: Minerals Critical for Energy Transition Lie on Ocean Floor

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It covers nearly three-quarters of our planet, but the ocean floor is less mapped than the moon, an astonishing fact driving a global push to build the clearest-yet picture of the seabed.

Understanding the ocean depths is crucial for everything from laying undersea cables and calculating tsunami paths, to projecting how seas will rise as the climate warms.

When Seabed 2030 launched in 2017, just 6% of the ocean floor was properly mapped. The project has boosted that figure to over 25%, harnessing historic data, sonar from research and industry vessels and growing computing power.

"As we put more data together, we get this beautiful picture of the seafloor; it's really like bringing it into focus," said Vicki Ferrini, head of the project's Atlantic and Indian Ocean Centre. "You start to see the details and the patterns; you start to understand the [ocean] processes in a different way," added Ferrini, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.