For national and international policymakers, decisions on how to regulate — and whether to allow — exploitative human activities such as deep-sea mining require good information. A new study suggests that when it comes to the ocean floor, they may not have it. Only 0.001% of the deep seafloor has ever been captured by photo or video images, the study found. And that which has been captured is “biased” and potentially unrepresentative: 65% of observations have been in the waters of the United States, Japan or New Zealand, according to the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances on May 7. Lead author Katy Croff Bell, president of Ocean Discovery League, a U.S.-based nonprofit, said the study shows how much is still unknown about the deep sea and how much more research is required. “We’ve only seen 0.001%, and look at how much we know [from that] 0.001%,” she told Mongabay. “How much do we not know that’s yet to be discovered?” Ocean Discovery League president Katy Croff Bell prepares a low-cost winch system for deep-sea exploration during trials conducted off the coast of the U.S. state of Rhode Island in September 2023. Image courtesy of Ocean Discovery League/Susan Poulton. The deep sea is one of the hardest areas on Earth to study. The crushing pressure created by gravity, along with absolute darkness, make it hard to reach and navigate safely. “We know more about the dark side of the moon than we do about this, the deep…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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