Do you want to become a deep -sea scout? Don’t worry, there are a lot left.

People have visually documented around 1,470 square miles or only 0.001 percent of the deep seabed, According to a new study. That is slightly larger than the size of Rhode Island.

The report, published on Wednesday in the Journal Science Advances, arrives as a debate on Nations Whether he should strive for industrial mining of the seabed For critical minerals.

Some scientists claim that so little is known about the submarine world that more research into the deep seabed is needed to continue with extractive activities.

“More information is always useful, so we can make better -informed and better decisions,” said Katy Croff Bell, a marine biologist who led the study and is the founder of the Ocean Discovery League, a non -profit group that promotes the reconnaissance of the seabed.

Learning more about the deep sea is essential to understand how climate change and human activities influence the oceans, she said. But the study also emphasizes the fundamental excitement of exploration that many marine scientists drive.

“You can simply imagine what is in the rest of the 99,999 percent,” said Dr. Bell.

Visual documentation of the Deep Sea, which started with the Diepzee entrepreneurs Trieste in 1958 and then Alvin in 1960, lets biologists discover and observe new organisms how they deal with each other and offer their environments and insight into ocean ecosystems.

It is a challenge to bring deep sea organisms to the surface. Adapted for high pressure, few animals survive, if present, the trip, so photos and videos are crucial.

“There are some habitats that you cannot taste from a ship,” said Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the University of Louisiana who was not involved in the study. “You have to go there in a rov and do it,” he said, referring to remote vehicles operated.

Getting visuals also helps geologists. Before the arrival of remotely operated submarine vehicles and crew members, researchers became a more limited approach: dropping a large bucket of a ship, dragging, dragging up and seeing what was in it.

“They would just have a mess of rocks and try to sort it out without context,” said Emily Chin, a geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that was not involved in the new study. “It’s like people who study meteorites and try to understand a process on another planet.”

Seeing rock access on seabed in photos and videos has enabled scientists to learn how fundamental earth processes work. It also helps companies to assess potential sites for mining and / or oil and gas activities.

But reaching the seabed is expensive, both in funds and time. Exploring a square kilometer deep seabed can cost everywhere from $ 2 million to $ 20 million, Dr. Bell. The dives can take years to prepare you, and only a few hours to go wrong. And as soon as a dive is going on, it progresses slowly. A Rover tied to a ship has a limited exploration, moving at a crawl and moving the ship is annoying.

With so many barriers, Dr. wanted Bell know how much seabed we have seen and how much there is still to explore.

Dr. Bell and her employees collected more than 43,000 records of deep -sea diving and assessed the photos and videos that were collected, where it was estimated how much seabed the dives were documented.

All in all, they estimate that between 2,130 and 3,823 square kilometers of the deep seabed are depicted. That amounts to around 0.001 percent of the entire deep seabed.

“I knew it would be small, but I am not sure if I expected it would be rather small,” said Dr. Bell. “We’ve been doing this for almost 70 years.”

The study excludes its own dives where the data is not publicly available, such as from military operations or oil and gas exploration. Even if they increased the documented area with an order of size, Dr. Bell said, “I don’t think it’s enough to move the needle.”

Much of what the deep-sea-marine biologists know about the seabed is based on that small group. The situation is related to extrapolating information from an area smaller than Houston to all land surfaces of the earth, the authors say.

The study also showed that countries with a high income led 99.7 percent of all deep dives, with the United States, Japan and New Zealand at the top of the charts. Most dives were within 200 nautical miles of those three countries. This means that diving is led by a small group of countries, which may promote a bias what is being investigated and where, the authors said.

“There are many people around the world who have deep sea expertise,” said Dr. Bell. “They just don’t have the tools to be able to do the kind of research and exploration that they want to do.”

Diving is usually in the same areas, such as the Mariana Trench of Monterey Canyon, or focus on the same types of interesting characteristics, such as hydrothermic ventilation openings, the study showed. And since the 1980s, most deep dives are in shallower, more coastal waters. That leaves many areas in the deep sea unexplored.

“The study is a good assessment of where we are and, literally, where we have to go into depth,” said Dr. McClain.