One common claim is that humans have only explored five percent of the ocean. If true, this surely means the deep is home to untold numbers of undiscovered creatures, perhaps even entire phylum oceanographers know nothing about. For the more excitable members of the populus, this could also mean potential sea monsters, advanced underwater civilizations, or UFO launching pads.
Those were among some of the possibilities aired to explain the Baltic Sea Anomaly, an aquatic mystery about four yards thick, 55 yards wind, an unnatural formation. While the size was right, the notion of it being unknown proved a mistaken one. In an article for Skeptical Inquirer, Benjamin Radford noted that Stockholm University associate professor of geology Volker Brüchert described the item as one consisting of granites, gneisses, and sandstones. Tellingly, this is consistent with being a glacial basin, which describes the Baltic Sea.
As to the unexplored 95 percent, Radford wrote that oceanographers, like astrophysicists, need not to be present at the object of their study to makes informed inferences about what it’s like there. As NOAA explained, “There are ways to visualize what the planet looks like beneath that watery shroud. Sonar-based instruments mounted on ships can distinguish the shape 4680 of the seafloor.” To be fair, this comes with limitations, specifically this has usually only happened where ships and sonar are frequently present.
Radford interviewed David Sandwell at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who noted that there are two basic approaches to mapping the deep seafloor. The first uses large research vessels equipped with multibeam sonar, with this method having been used to map 20 percent of the world’s saltwater. The second way incorporates satellite altimeters and measures the marine gravity field. So the idea that the ocean is a 95 percent mystery is false.
Reasons the ocean floor isn’t more fully explored aren’t hard to fathom. For one thing, oceanography receives far less funding than space exploration. Couple that with the fact that detailed ocean floor mapping is both time consuming and expensive, and current resolution is adequate for most practical purposes, and that explains it.
Unless there’s a search for something specific, such as a missing vessels, sunken treasure, or untapped resources, there’s no reason to go through the expensive and time-consuming process. The idea that there would be exciting mysteries there is we looked is hopeful at beset. Radford notes that even on land there are huge swaths of land that haven’t been explored, which does not equal that terrain being home to wild new wonders.