Strange creatures such as vampire squids and spotted fish in the dark, cold, deep sea make their houses a complete mystery.

This is because a new study shows that humans account for 0.001% of the world's deepest.

In fact, the directly visualized deep-sea floor area is roughly equivalent to Rhode Island Report In the diary Science Advances.

Maps created with tools like Sonar can show the shape of the seabed, but sending the camera downwards at 200 meters or more than 656 feet, where the sun starts to fade rapidly and the waters become cold and dark. This is a marine area considered “deep”.

“The truth is that when you get there with a remotely operated vehicle or other type of deep-filled vehicle, you can only see a small portion of the deep-sea floor at any time.” Katy Croff Bell The nonprofit marine discovery alliance leading the new study.

She has personally been exploring the deep sea for about a quarter of a century. "But I didn't think about myself until about four or five years ago, how much did we actually see?" she explained. “Then I started trying to find that statistic.”

The estimates she saw ranged from less than one percent to as many as ten percent.

To better understand the total area of ​​deep-sea floors that have been observed so far, she and her colleagues have created a database of all known efforts. They found records of more than 43,000 trips starting in 1958, from robot vehicles to human-driven submarines to simple landers without movement.

It turns out that most exploratory expeditions take place 200 nautical miles in the United States, Japan and New Zealand. These three countries, as well as France and Germany, have put in almost all their efforts.

As a result, scientists really don’t see a very representative sample of what is happening around the world.

"The Indian Ocean is one of the least explored areas," she said.

Bell said we don’t know which habitats might be found—even though the deep sea may be invisible to most people, the currents there bring oxygen and key nutrients to the surface.

“All of these things are connected and have affected us in many different ways,” she said.

There is little to be explored under the deep sea that shows that it can have huge different ecosystems to support very different creatures. In the ocean, explorers have seen hot vents, alkaline vents and cold seepage.

“However, given the little bias we’ve seen, we really can’t give you a global map of all the habitats in the deep sea because we haven’t been to all of them yet,” she said.

Past deep explorations reveal completely unexpected forms of life. For example, in the 1970s, researchers found microorganisms in hydrothermal ventilation holes that did not rely on the sun and photosynthesis at all, but instead gained energy from chemical reactions.

“That was completely revolutionary and completely rewrites all the science books,” she said.

Geologists and deep-sea experts Jeffrey Karson Syracuse University, which is not part of the research team, said it was the first time he had seen well-documented numbers that did encapsulate the discovery of deep-sea floors so far.

He said he would think that humans see less than 1% of the total area, but was still surprised by the faction's "so small numbers."

"We spent a lot of money trying to understand other planets, maybe outside the solar system. But on our own planet, we rarely know about the situation in this field, covering two-thirds of our planet," Carson said. "Almost every time we go there, we learn something new and exciting, and many of our findings on the bottom of the sea are accidental.

Changing the way ocean exploration will require focusing on developing low-cost technologies available to more communities around the world. Jon Copleyis a marine biologist at the University of Southampton, UK.

"If I were a billionaire philanthropist, I wanted to really get stuck in exploring the oceans, rather than building a superyacht research vessel, but fully support the development and growth of these low-cost platforms," ​​Copley said.

He said the new study shows that over the years, many places on deep-sea floors have been known to have been repeatedly visited, but that is not a bad thing.

"It's always great to go and see the next rising thing, you won't see your light from the deep diving car," he said. "But, of course, there's a significant need to go back to the same place over and over to see what's changing over time."