The air pressure just 3,000 meters below the surface is fatal for inexperienced people. The cold and the pressure are the most dangerous things down there. But there are beauties, animals, and ecosystems that humans have never seen. Some of them are older than the Dinosaurs, and survived the biggest mass extinction Earth has ever been through. Humans have been exploring space more than they have looked at the ocean, and there’s a reason for it – it’s easier. In the 1960s, humans went to the moon, and after that, it became normal to launch a spaceship into space, but swimming and exploring the ocean is not.
Exploring the ocean while saving time
The ocean covers 70% of the planet, and scientists have not gone as far as 7% yet. This is for countless reasons, one of them being its dangerous nature and unpredictability, but it’s also hard to map the ocean and know what to expect in a dive in an unexplored place.
The SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) mission is a joint effort between the most renowned research organizations that use a satellite to map the ocean floor, a very different approach from the ships equipped with sonars and taking days to scan a single area.
The satellite covers about 90% of the Earth in 21 days. The result of the mission launched in December 2022 is the discovery of 100,000 underwater mountains. Exploring the ocean is an urgent frontier to find minerals and more [dinosaur] fossils to covert into fuel.
Hidden mountains older than dinosaurs
The ocean is full of underwater mountains, but they do not break the surface. They rise from the ocean floor and are difficult to detect because they measure less than 3,300 feet.
The technique to find these structures, which are a result of millions of years of volcanic activity and friction between tectonic plates, relies on gravity. Ocean mountains and abyssal hills cause the water level to rise slightly at the surface. The SWOT is able to detect these subtle changes and transform the information into a detailed map of what’s below that area.
These mountains were here before the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub asteroid 66 million years ago, which ended the reign of non-avian species during the Cretaceous-Paleogene era. Millions of years later, the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collided, and it brought to life one of the biggest mountains in the world, the Himalayas.
Boston is next to a large ocean mountain
One of the most famous sea mountains is located right off the coast of Massachusetts. The New England Seamounts were formed from a volcanic hotspot in the North American continent. The oldest in the mountain chain, the Bear Seamount, formed around 100 to 103 million years ago, when Dinosaurs were still walking on Earth.
The process of creating those mountains is caused by tectonic plates. The volcanic activity is a result of that, and when lava cools down, it forms these giant structures throughout millions of years, and just the formation process outlives and resists almost everything on the planet, like the dinosaur extinction.
South America has the longest mountain chain in the World
While the Himalayas have the highest peaks, the Andes have the largest, with 3,371,000 kilometers. The formation of mountains below or above sea level is an ongoing process that never ends. It stops at the surface, with only a handful of volcanic activity happening, but in the ocean, where not even 10% has been explored, and most of the process is not visible, these sea mountains can rise to the surface in a couple of million years, but like the Dinosaurs, we might not be here to see.