The fact that humanity has more accurate maps of Mars than our own ocean floor has an almost philosophical quality. This seems to be something that Katy Croff Bell considers frequently, and unlike most people who think about it over dinner and then forget about it in the morning, she has taken action. A 3D interactive globe with 10,000 target locations on the world’s deep seafloor—each of which represents a location no human eye has ever truly seen—was unveiled this week by the National Geographic Explorer and founder of the Ocean Discovery League. It’s the kind of project that seems unachievable until you realize that someone has already quietly worked on it for years.
Bell’s group did more than simply lay out a map and call it science. It feels significant that they published their research methods in the journal Science Advances alongside the interactive globe. In deep-sea research, which has historically been dominated by a small group of wealthy countries, transparency like that is very important. The map is based on a dataset of nearly 44,000 deep-sea dives from 1958 to 2024. However, when Bell’s team examined all of that combined human labor, they discovered that it amounted to about 12,000 distinct locations, the majority of which were concentrated along the coasts of the US, Japan, and New Zealand. We have been exploring the same area for decades.
0.001 percent is the number that keeps popping up and stops you in your tracks. That is the largest area of the seafloor that humans have ever seen. In a 2025 study, Bell released that estimate, comparing the explored area to an area about the size of Rhode Island. Over half of the planet’s surface is covered by the deep sea. Not only is that ratio humble, but it’s also a little unsettling—the kind of statistic that subtly changes your perspective on what we actually know.
Bell’s team had to determine what factors made one uncharted seafloor area significantly different from another in order to build the 10,000 target points. They came to four conclusions: food availability, which refers to the amount of organic material that drifts down from the surface; composition, which includes sediment types, hydrothermal vents, and what researchers refer to as “ooze,” a sediment partially composed of microscopic animal skeletons; depth; and seafloor shape, which includes seamounts, abyssal plains, and trenches. These classifications are not arbitrary. These are the factors that determine what species may exist in complete obscurity, what ecosystems form, and what lives down there. Making the right choice was crucial.
Additionally, the project has a purposeful corrective. Instead of concentrating once more around the affluent countries that have historically dominated ocean research, the new target locations lean toward places that have historically been ignored, such as The Gambia, Sri Lanka, and Trinidad and Tobago. The paper’s lead author, Kristen Johannes, a project scientist at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, put it simply: for fifty or seventy years, scientists have been filling in the gaps close to their own coastlines. The objective is now to begin in the center of the image. It sounds like a modest goal until you realize that the majority of the ocean is in the middle.
Additionally, Bell is contributing to the development of DORIS, the Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System, a low-cost deep-sea imaging tool that will enable researchers to swiftly survey the seafloor without the high cost that has long prevented smaller institutions and developing countries from conducting deep-sea research. If given the chance, Sheena Talma, a marine biologist and National Geographic Explorer who studies fish in the Southwest Indian Ocean, said she would use both the map and DORIS. Her statement regarding the map, “Having a point on a map really helps when you do not know where to start,” struck me as subtly profound.
Bell predicts that the number of unique seafloor locations will almost double if those 10,000 points are eventually explored. Given the current state of funding, access, and political will, it is truly unclear whether that will occur in five years or twenty-five. However, the map is now available. It is visible to everyone. Bell seems to grasp something that the scientific community as a whole is still learning: you can’t protect what you can’t see, and you can’t see it if you’ve never bothered to look.
