Why the Deepest Parts of the Ocean Remain a Mystery | Unveiled

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Why the Deepest Parts of the Ocean Remain a Mystery</h4>

The deep sea is a strange and unusual place. It’s maybe the most enigmatic on our entire planet,  and we’ve barely scratched the surface where exploring it is concerned. But what, exactly, ARE the reasons keeping us from learning everything about the deepest, darkest depths?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: why do the deepest parts of the ocean remain a mystery?

One of the biggest reasons we haven’t explored much of the deep ocean is, simply, that it’s extremely difficult. Before the last hundred years or so, it was immensely hard to explore the sea. It’s taken advances not just in submersibles, but in robotics, so that we can safely send remote probes down into the sea without having to build pressurized, crewed vessels. We didn’t really have large, usable submarines until the First World War – although, history buffs will know that older versions did exist, and that submarines were actually used in combat during the American Civil War in the 1860s. We also had to make do with bulky diving suits, developed in the early 18th century, as well as diving bells. Diving bells go further back, all the way to Ancient Greece, and are still used today, but offer limited mobility compared to other means of exploring the ocean.

A big motivator in the development of diving, specifically, was money. Humans have been diving since time immemorial. In some cultures, freediving is practiced to harvest resources such as sponges and pearls. In more modern times, diving expeditions have been conducted to salvage treasures from sunken ships. Today, we have many alternative means to gather resources, such as through industrial fishing and deep-sea trawlers. This means that diving has become increasingly a recreational activity. These days, ocean research only receives a small amount of public funding, in stark contrast to the time when undersea ventures could bring about massive profits. There IS still money to be made from the sea, but only on large scales, and there’s little diving required to do so. Plus, commercial ventures are often at odds with ocean research, which prioritizes conservation. Overfishing is a big threat to ocean diversity, and we definitely don’t want the onus of ocean exploration to fall on industrial fishing companies that are incentivized by short-term profits to damage these environments.

Ocean research organizations like NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, are desperately underfunded. While even space research is arguably underfunded, ocean research is more so, and doesn’t carry the public allure that space does. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve famously only mapped 5% of the ocean in detail. Only a third of the seafloor around the US has been mapped with modern sonar. NOAA wants to explore the seas, but without more money, it’s not going to be able to do so.

There are still more reasons the oceans are mysterious, however, other than just a lack of funding and research. Put simply, the sea is dangerous. Being a fisher is one of the deadliest professions in the entire world, with some studies even putting it as THE deadliest profession, and that’s all down to the danger of the ocean itself. The big danger is the weather. Fishing in the tropics brings the risk of hurricanes, with high wind speeds and enormous waves. These can easily send fishers overboard, where the drowning risk is very high. Severe storms can also sink entire ships, not just because of the winds but because of other phenomena, like waterspouts or whirlpools. Even underwater creatures aren’t safe, with hurricanes affecting the seafloor. Plus, while it’s easy to imagine waves as only happening on the surface of the ocean, that’s not true. Frighteningly, there are underwater waves the height of skyscrapers, far taller than even the biggest tsunamis. They break underwater, too. This all combines to make underwater exploration very dangerous both above and below the surface. 

Finally, beyond the extreme weather, there’s the pressure. The pressure in the deepest parts of the sea is strong enough to crush you instantly if you were suddenly exposed to it, which would certainly be an unpleasant way to go. The pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, down in Challenger Deep, is more than 1,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. It’s so intense that even some submersibles DESIGNED to weather these depths, like the Nereus, have been destroyed by the pressure.

There’s the wildlife to consider, too. While the sea creatures living at this depth have probably never seen a human before and may not recognize a human as either a threat or potential food, there is always the chance that some deep-dwelling monster might attack. Luckily, there are very few cases of this happening. Most shark attacks, for instance, happen around beaches, and even the largest shark in the world, the Great White Shark, doesn’t usually dive too deep. There are stories of that OTHER deep-sea giant, the giant squid, attacking humans– but not a single one has ever been truly substantiated. The elusive creature has only been captured on camera in the wild a handful of times, and nobody actually knows how big they can get. That’s one reason they’re so mysterious, because they live so deep, in the sea’s twilight zone, that they’re hard to find. They don’t usually come close to the surface at all. There ARE a handful of credible stories of cephalopods attacking humans, but these are often octopuses that have been provoked. If humans decide we really want to explore the deepest ocean trenches in small submarines, a giant squid COULD, in theory, cause some trouble – but it’s just as likely that the squid would swim away from any large object. They’re a primary food source for sperm whales, after all, and have exceptional vision. They’d see us coming long before we could reach one.

Exploring the sea is so difficult and treacherous that even when we DO know roughly where things are, it can be impossible to study them fully. We KNOW where Challenger Deep is, for instance, but almost nobody has seen it and we still know very little about it. For a key example of just how difficult ocean exploration is, you need only look at shipwrecks. There’s estimated to be as many as three million shipwrecks in the sea, going back thousands of years, with many of them unidentified. Among them are many missing ships that we’ve looked for, but have been unable to find. For instance, the Titanic is arguably the most famous shipwreck in the world, but the wreck wasn’t found until 1985, 73 years after it sank in 1912. That’s despite there being many survivors, a huge rescue effort, and people knowing exactly where it sank. There were many failed attempts at finding it before a French–American expedition successfully did so. In the end, it WAS found, in two pieces and resting on an abyssal plane, 12,500 feet below the surface. 

Many more famous missing ships and planes are still out there, too, like those in the Bermuda Triangle. Scientists agree that there’s nothing remotely supernatural about the Triangle, it’s simply a very busy part of the sea prone to extreme weather events. But that doesn’t mean that those missing ships aren’t still worth investigating. The USS Cyclops is out there somewhere, and perhaps someday its wreck will be found, too, much like the Titanic. Even the most enticing shipwrecks, like those thought to contain masses of treasure, aren’t always found though. The 1715 Treasure Fleet from Spain boasted 11 ships in its ranks; all were sunk in a devastating hurricane off the coast of Florida. A French frigate, which had sailed with the ship but remained further out, survived. Three of the sunk ships still haven’t been found to this day. We know where they sank, when they sank, where most of the wrecks are, and have had over 300 years to find them, and we still haven’t managed it even with hundreds of millions of dollars in gold at stake. THAT’s how difficult ocean exploration really is.

Do YOU think it’s worth it to explore the oceans? Let us know!

Ultimately, the seas are fascinating places, but exploring them is challenging and dangerous, thanks to extreme weather events and pressure deep underwater. And that’s why the deepest parts of the ocean remain a mystery.