Today in Science: We’ve never seen 99.999% of the ocean floor

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May 9, 2025—We've only seen a shockingly small percentage of Earth's ocean floor. Plus, the sun may be entering its strong era; and we visit the nation's only particle collider.    —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor TODAY'S NEWS NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO/S. Wiessinger Solar activity goes through 11-year cycles, but scientists think the sun may be entering an era of stronger cycles. | 5 min read For a long time, conceptual problems, ideology clashes and xenophobia prevented the concept of zero from catching on. Today all mathematics is based on it. | 5 min read Inuit people really do have many words for "snow," just as Samoans have many words for "lava" and Scots have multiple words for "oatmeal," according to a broad new computational analysis of world languages. | 4 min read A bipartisan group of House members is drafting a sweeping bill to overhaul FEMA, hoping to head off the Trump Administration's aim to shrink or abolish the agency. | 4 min read What is a galaxy? It's more difficult than you'd think to come up with a solid definition. | 5 min read More News TOP STORIES This heatmap shows the concentration of known deep-sea dives with visual observations in the North Atlantic. Ocean Discovery League Undiscovered Deep Sea We've only managed to directly see a mere 0.001 percent of the deep sea floor, according to a report based on 43,681 records from submersible expeditions conducted around the world, each to a minimum of 200 meters (about 656 feet). That's a shockingly tiny amount, about the same area as that of Rhode Island. Comparatively, we've obtained high-resolution images of practically all the surfaces of the moon and Mars.     What this means: Using altimeters on satellites or sonar technology, scientists have devised clever ways to circumvent kilometers of cold, crushingly pressurized waters to indirectly model the sea floor. Plus, there's more to exploration than just "seeing" an environment. Three elements—visual imaging, terrain mapping and physical sampling—constitute fully exploring an unknown environment. That said, there are still smaller details that coarser-grained mapping or sampling might otherwise miss. For example, it was through deep-sea cameras that we were able to learn about hydrothermal vents—a discovery that showed organisms could flourish even in the ocean's darkest places.   What could happen: "The ocean bottom, we know, is very complex," says Mathieu Lapôtre, a geophysicist at Stanford University. "It has all these features that are fascinating for many reasons—for example, the origins of life, plate tectonics, and the subduction zones and all those things—it's a complex terrain. And right now, we're missing a lot of that complexity." Exploration of the remaining 99.999 percent of the deep ocean is "really going to give us an amazing opportunity to ask new questions we'd never even thought of before," says Katy Croff Bell, study lead author and president of the Ocean Discovery League. —Gayoung Lee, news intern

WATCH THIS Jeffery DelViscio/ScientificAmerican Scientific American traveled to Brookhaven National Laboratory, home to the only particle collider in the U.S. The current work at the lab will end this year, to be replaced in the 2030s by a new particle collider called the Electron-Ion Collider, which will peer closely at protons and neutrons and the strong force that holds them together. Science, Quickly host Rachel Feltman met with Brookhaven scientist Alex Jentsch to learn more. PLAY NOW Did you keep up with science news this week? Test your knowledge with this week's science quiz. Also check out today's Spellements puzzle. This week, three players spotted that the word covalence was missing from the puzzle, which is the sharing of electrons between atoms. A great science word! More Games EXPERT PERSPECTIVES Even in places in the country where political tensions run high, the public library is a space where people with diverse political views can find common ground, writes Laura Backstrom, associate professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University. Though they enjoy massive public support, "These trusted places are increasingly under attack by extreme partisan efforts to reshape public institutions through financial strangulation and by censorship. Defending our public libraries against these attacks is part of a larger struggle for the integrity of the institutions essential to democracy," she says. | 4 min read More Opinion MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK How Being Watched Changes How You Think | 6 min read The Pyrotechnic Chemistry of the Vatican's Pope Smoke Signals Explained | 3 min read NASA Spent Billions to Bring Rocks Back from Mars. Trump Wants to Leave Them There | 7 min read One major challenge when exploring the ocean depths: Crushing pressure from the water. For every 33 feet (10 meters) of saltwater depth, pressure increases by an atmosphere (one atmosphere is the pressure of air at sea level, or approximately 14.7 pounds per square inch). Almost two years ago, a tourist submersible called Titan suffered catastrophic failure of its pressurized chamber. Its wreckage was found near the Titanic shipwreck 12,500 feet beneath the sea surface, where the pressure is about 375 atmospheres. Traveling to the depths is no safer than flying above Earth's surface. Relax this weekend and keep your feet on dry ground. And send any feedback or other ideas to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you Monday.   —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

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