In 2012, acclaimed oceanographer Paul Snelgrove told a TEDTalk audience that the next frontier wasn’t in our skies, but rather underwater.
“We know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about the deep sea floor despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen, or a drop of water from those bodies,” he said.
Seven years later, over 80 percent of the ocean remains unmapped. Sonar can map less than 10 percent of the ocean’s bottom and satellite gravity data cannot detect anything smaller than a kilometer in size.
But a global competition sponsored by Shell, the Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, might change our understanding of Earth’s final frontier. The competition will dole out $7 million on Friday to the team producing the best technology for rapid, unmanned, and bathymetric—the measurement of the depth of water—exploration.
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