When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing in 2014, investigators thought it had crashed in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 1,200 miles southwest of Perth. Except the area was so deep and unexplored that in order to locate the wreckage, search teams had to map the floor of the ocean first.
In reality, about 80% of the ocean hasn’t been explored, at least not to the level of detail that could spot a plane wreck, let alone a smaller detail like the spire of an underwater volcano. Mapping the ocean floor can make navigation (and rescue search missions) safer and more efficient, but it can also help us track and protect marine life, predict natural disasters, and even understand the impact of climate change.
Last week, Fabien Cousteau—an oceanographic explorer and the grandson of legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau—completed the mapping of an entire marine protected area off the coast of Curaçao, where he plans to build the world’s largest underwater research habitat. Once all the data is processed, the 3D map will serve as an engineering study for the lab. It will also be another step in the decades-long movement to map the entire surface of the ocean floor.“Just like on land, where we’re doing lidar scans or looking at something as simple as a hiking trail map, it gives us a much better understanding of where we need to go,” says Cousteau. “The more granular the detail, the more we understand what kinds of minerals may be in an ecosystem, what kind of fauna lives and thrives there.”
3D maps would provide a window to the mysteries at the bottom of the ocean. “With enough detail, we can get a current picture of what’s going on in any particular place,” says Tomer Ketter, who cofounded the nonprofit Map the Gaps to grow awareness of ocean mapping, and who was involved in the Curaçao mapping alongside acoustical engineering company R2Sonic. “Everything is governed by the shape of the seafloor.”
In Curaçao, the team mapped a surface area of 1,500 acres of reef and over 1,000 acres of inner bays. The operation took a week and cost a quarter-million dollars, funded by Cousteau’s Proteus Ocean Group, with equipment donations from R2Sonic and the Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity, which loaned the boat needed for the mapping.The site-mapping is the next step in Cousteau’s endeavor to build his underwater habitat in Curaçao (the initial concept for the structure was designed by Yves Behar.) After an initial round of funding that secured $1 million, Cousteau’s eyes are now set on the next $8 million (he estimates it will take $135 million to build the habitat and operate it for the first three years). “What happens to the ocean happens to us,” he says. “The only reason we exist is because we’re an oasis in space, and without the ocean, all life that we know doesn’t exist.”
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