The crew of the Falkor (too) research vessel is at it again: In January, the team discovered four underwater mountains off the coast of Chile. The vessel has now identified 29 seamounts, hills, and trenches since 2012.
The seamounts range in height from 5,220 feet (1,591 meters) to a staggering 8,796 feet (2,681 meters). For reference, Burj Khalifa—the world’s tallest building—is half that size at 2,717 feet tall. The seamounts were not previously included in any bathymetry database the team could find and were stumbled upon as the crew was on its way to study gravity anomalies on the seafloor.
“Examining gravity anomalies is a fancy way of saying we looked for bumps on a map, and when we did, we located these very large seamounts while staying on schedule for our first science expedition in Chile at the start of this year,” said John Fulmer, a marine technician for the Schmidt Ocean Institute, in an institute release.
To date, the research vessels Falkor and Falkor (too) have mapped 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers) of seafloor. When the vessels are heading to a new location, they typically collect mapping data, helping fill in gaps in our knowledge of what lies at the bottom of the sea.
“With 75 percent of the ocean still to be mapped, there is much to be uncovered,” said Jamie McMichael-Phillips, project director of Seabed 2030, an effort to map the complete seabed by the end of the decade. “Ocean mapping is crucial to our understanding of the planet and, in turn, our ability to ensure its protection and sustainable management.”
Often, the mountains and trenches on the seafloor provide a haven for deep-sea organisms, like coral, sponges, and anemones. Reefs become biodiversity hotspots in their own right. Last year, Falkor (too) captured remarkable video of hydrothermal vents on an underwater mountain range and imagery of vibrant coral reefs off the Galápagos.
Detailed maps of the seafloor can even reveal bits of human history; in 2019, a different research team revealed jarring maps showing craters on the Pacific seafloor made by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. And the ocean floor needs to be preserved: research in 2020 indicated that it would take about 50 years for the seafloor off Peru to recover from deep sea mining done in the mid-20th century.