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Comment by habnds | Hacker News Reader

A quick summary:

Only 6% of the ocean floor has been mapped. People at the Seabed 2030 project plan to map the ocean floor in high res by 2030.

Reasons to do this include navigation safety, ability to lay fiber optic wire and pipelines, because we don't know what's there, weather forecasts since water/temperature flows along ocean floor contours affect atmospheric flows, tsunami predictions, we could find sea wrecks.

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I hadn't thought about the possibility of sunken ships and sea wrecks until you mentioned it. I wonder how many mysteries this sea-floor mapping endeavor will put to rest? If they can put even one big mystery (something like finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370) to bed, they'd get a lot of great publicity.

Yeah on the one hand it's cool possibility for historians and stuff, on the other it kind of ruins the adventurous scuba diver studying old maps and stuff searching for lost treasure.

Firstly, who still does this? Nobody I know in the scuba diving community "[studies] old maps and stuff searching for lost treasure". That'd be a good way to not have a dive plan and end up in trouble.

Secondly, no scuba diver is about to dive on the ocean floor. Maybe you're thinking of deep sea divers, who dive in a submarine or other deep sea vessel?

Imagine all the gold and treasure there waiting for other people to lay claim on! Forget those conniving explorers they only found it but its not theirs.

They mapped a pretty large area of the ocean floor looking for that wreckage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190380

Imagine finding a Roman galley out in the Atlantic, or even more than one. I'm always amazed Madeira and the Azores weren't colonized before the Portuguese arrived in the early 1400's, even though there are possible Roman, Viking, and Genovese references or evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madeira

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Azores

Another thing that fascinates me are seamounts: volcanoes that either didn't reach the surface or that did but later eroded and subsided. With sea levels 100-150 ft lower in the last ice age, many eroded to that level, leaving a flat-topped mountain that far beneath the surface. It's too deep for normal scuba, but amateur underwater drones could easily explore them.

We only have a few years to bring back Sealab 2021.

Bizzarroooo!

Take some more pills, pillhead.

I would rather have an international law (if such laws exist) that force fiber optic and pipeline companies to share their underwater map data to everyone, essentially force an open source data for it. No need for governments to spend money when private companies can do it because they need to.

In the UK this information is already published. They don't want fisherman accidentally damaging their assets.

What about: https://earthlymission.com/world-ocean-floor-map/

You mean a mostly artistic rendition based on rough known features?

Based on soundings. Which is at some resolution, not based simply on what pokes above the surface.

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-cultu...

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