has some region of the seafloor that falls

within their territorial waters and many countries,

including the U.S. the area that's underwater

exceeds the area that's above water.

So huge amounts of nation's areas

and regions are just really unexplored, uncharacterized.

We don't really know what's there.

We know less about our seabed

than we do about the surface of the Moon or Mars.

Only 20% of it has been mapped.

A map of the seafloor could lead to all kinds

of discoveries, like new marine species

and rare earth minerals, like cobalt

that we need for electric cars and mobile phones.

The value of all the gold deposits alone on the seafloor

is estimated to be around $150 trillion.

A map could also help us when tragedy strikes.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared

from radar screens.

The mapping of the ocean floor is being carried out.

The problem is that the Southern Indian Ocean

is just so incredibly huge.

To me a map is a fundamental piece of understanding

of who we are, where we are, where things are.

Once you understand something, you start to value it more

and when you start to value something,

that's when you start to really think about

making it healthy and preserving it and keeping it going.

A map is the first step,

it's the basic understanding that you need

to figure out where you are.

Oceans,

they cover over 70% of the planet

but most of what lies underneath is a mystery.

The seafloor is a really fascinating landscape.

We don't have a lot of data

to describe the shape of it in detail

but in places where we do there are spectacular features.

There's meandering channels

with all kinds of interesting topography.

There are canyons, there are seamounts, mid-ocean ridges,

all kinds of things that we see on land

that are just basically hidden from us by the water.

As it stands, this is what a map of the seabed looks like.

All that black, those are the parts we haven't mapped yet.

At present most people think

that the seafloor is actually mapped

because you'll see a world ocean map,

and you can see some shape of the seafloor.

But most of that is based on prediction.

Roughly 80% of what you see for the world ocean floor

is modeled based on measurements of the sea surface height

and a computation based on gravity.

In 2017, The Nippon Foundation

and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans or GEBCO

launched Seabed 2030.

It's a collaborative project to collect

and collate data oceanwide

and create a complete map of the seafloor

by the end of the decade.

To do this would take one ship around 350 years

at a cost of up to $3 billion.

That's why data is harvested by all kinds of vessels

from fishing boats to freighters.

Because there is so little data

it's important that vessels that are capable

and willing to acquire data when they're just moving

around the ocean, do so.

So we have a lot of data that's collected during transits.

There's a lot of academic requirements

to make data publicly available.

There's industry data that's starting to become more

and more available, there's government data.

So there's a lot of different ways

that this data is coming in, and it's a really messy

and challenging puzzle to put together.

But what's exciting is that it's a puzzle to put together.

Since Seabed 2030 launched,

the area mapped has risen to 20%

and all the information collected is freely available.

The more data we have collectively

and other people can access,

the faster the discoveries are made.

Which really pushes forward our understanding

at a faster rate than if you held onto that data

and it was only you with that data.

Things like machine learning

and artificial intelligence are also going to kick in

in the next decade, because with all this data

they'll be able to make connections a lot faster

than perhaps we would have been able to.

Which then again, feeds our human understanding

and also gives us new ideas

and new ways of thinking, of exploration.

Until the early 20th century

mapping technology was simple.

Usually a weight attached to a long rope

known as a lead line.

After the Titanic sank in 1912,

explorers proposed using sound waves to find its hull

in the North Atlantic.

This led to sonar,

the most common technique used for mapping today.

Operated by the Schmidt Ocean Institute,

the Falkor is an 82 meter long research vessel

equipped with two multibeam sonar systems

that have helped Deborah Smith

and a team of other marine technicians

to map over a million square kilometers of the seafloor.

You know, you go from somebody

with a rope with some knots to sonar acoustics that is,

I call it math magic,

but it is incredibly advanced mathematical technology

to be able to measure the distance

and time of travel of sound on a moving ship.

Multibeam mapping works by using sonars.

So sonar is taking sound and the measurement of time.

So you have a multibeam sonar

and it sends out a ping of sound.

That sound travels through the water column,

hits the seafloor and comes back to the ship

and we measure that time

and we're able to calculate the distance.

Each individual ping of sound has many, many beams.

So it looks like a giant fan across the seafloor

and that fan is moving along the seafloor.

So you have many tiny, little beams going across

and they're traveling along a track.

You can look at that data and look at both the peaks

and the valleys and the highs and the lows

and sort of create a three-dimensional image

of the seafloor.

The accuracy of multibeam sonar really depends

on the water depth that you're in.

Think of it like a flashlight beam

and if you're holding a flashlight

and you're shining it on the floor,

the closer you get to the floor with your flashlight,

the smaller that beam is.

If you have 400 of these beams all across,

so think of 400 people holding a flashlight.

The closer they hold that flashlight to the seafloor,

the smaller your beam is which also means the smaller

that you can find information or data about.

So it really depends on the depth of the seafloor in order

to see how much you can define an object.

This variation in depth means that mapping resolution

will range from 100 x 100 meters in shallow waters

to 800 x 800 meters in the deepest parts of the ocean,

which go down as far as 11,000 meters.

Remotely operated vehicles or ROV's can then be sent down

to investigate seabed features up close.

We've just crossed the 1,000 meter mark.

It's 4.6 degrees C and now we're gonna drive the ROV down

at a high rate towards the seafloor.

On a recent mapping expedition,

scientists on the Falkor discovered

a 500-meter-tall coral structure

in Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

The first to be discovered in over 120 years.

A place that is incredibly popular, well visited,

well-traveled, you know, we're still finding new things.

You don't know until you map it.

And so until you get that sort of high-resolution picture

you don't know the sand waves

or the old riverbeds that used to be there

or the waterfalls off the side of a volcano

that used to be above the surface

and now is below the surface.

It's a little bit of everything.

Think of, let's say Hawaii or someplace

where you see a volcano above the water.

Picture that below the water.

I'm really kind of obsessed

with the whole concept of scale here.

Although we can create 3D models and, you know,

kind of come up with these visualizations.

It's not the same as that feeling

of looking out over this big landscape.

But I mean, I think we'll get there soon

with VR and other kinds of technology, but it's really

spectacular to think about,

especially with the familiarity that some of us have

with these features, like what it looks like.

We look out at the ocean and it just looks flat

maybe with little bumps.

We really don't think about all of this that's underneath

and it's really an amazing landscape

that's just hidden from us.

With more than 90% of the ocean deeper than 200 meters,

fleets of autonomous vehicles

could make the data gathering process faster,

cheaper, and safer

and new discoveries might help

with exploration of all kinds.

I think the ocean can actually provide us

with huge insights as we go out into space as well

and look for life and other kinds of life forms.

I also think in this next few years

we will have a different kind of access to the ocean

because of virtual reality and augmented reality.

And so that will allow us to sit in our living rooms

and really experience what's under water in a different way

and see this different alien planet.