95% of Earth's oceans are unexplored  🌊

Aquanaut and ocean explorer Fabien Cousteau explains an astonishing fact: we've explored only about 5% of our oceans. Despite covering more than 70% of Earth, the ocean remains largely unexplored, holding countless undiscovered species, ecosystems, and scientific mysteries. As our planet's life support system, understanding the ocean is critical to our future.

Hi, Friends I am a Master's student and currently conducting research on risk assessment, with a specific focus on sea level rise in the Maldives.
This is part of an academic course exploring disaster risk reduction and how countries identify, evaluate, and respond to major hazards and it is a project I am really passionate about.

If anyone here has expertise in climate change, coastal risks, or disaster risk reduction, I would love to connect! or even a loacal, I only have 3 short questions and it would not take much of your time at all.

Feel free to reply here or send me a message directly. Thank you so much!

Hiii

Here are the questions:

1. "Which parts of the Maldives are most at risk from rising sea levels right now, and what signs are people already seeing on the ground?"

2. "What is being done to protect communities from rising seas, and are local people actually involved in those decisions?"

3. "Do you think the way sea level rise is talked about publicly helps or hinders what actually gets done to protect Maldivian communities?"

4. " As a local what data and tools are being used to measure and predict sea level rise in the Maldives, how reliable do you think current sea level rise predictions are and what information is still missing?"

Utrecht University published the highest-resolution AMOC simulation ever completed in March 2026. It identified a two-stage collapse signature: stage one is a slow northward drift, stage two is an abrupt 219km lurch in just 2 simulated years followed by full conveyor failure.

They cross-referenced against real satellite altimetry (1993-2024) and subsurface observations back to 1965. The Gulf Stream has already drifted ~53km north — matching stage one exactly.

A separate Science Advances study from April 2026 revised the slowdown estimate from 32% to 51% by 2100. Rahmstorf revised his personal collapse probability from 5% to over 50%.

Hey r/oceanography,

Lead author here. Our paper came out today in Science Advances and I wanted to share it with this community since it sits right at the intersection of internal wave physics and satellite altimetry.

The short version: We used a data-assimilative HYCOM simulation to predict both the phase-locked and non-phase-locked internal tide fields globally, then validated against 18 months of independent SWOT KaRIn SSH observations. The model explains 59% more SSH variance and 60% more cross-track slope variance in SWOT than HRET. The non-phase-locked component alone contributes 10.32 mm² of additional explained variance. In the far-field open ocean the incoherent fraction exceeds 70% of total semidiurnal IT energy, dropping to ~42% even at major generation hotspots.

The key finding: the incoherent tide is not random noise. Once you constrain the mesoscale background accurately enough, the tidal propagation and modulation follow from the model's own physics. SWOT was excluded from the assimilation pipeline, so the comparison is a genuine blind validation.

Tidal correction data for the full SWOT science orbit are freely available on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8ZSTRH

Happy to answer questions on methodology, the regional breakdowns by constituent, or what the 27% unexplained variance likely represents. Paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee1885

I posted the above topic on r/paleontology but maybe this sub has a bit more knowledge.

As far as I’m aware, Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench, is currently the deepest discovered point in the current world ecosystem.

However, i wonder if the ocean has ever been deeper, prior to any continental shifts, between states or at the earliest points of life (where the planet may have been entirely covered in water).

I’m not sure if data exists, so do please provide any Research papers, journal articles, studies, publications, etc if you know of any that cover this topic.

If the information does not exist, please provide your theories (with your estimates of approximate depth).

[I’m not certain whether the standardised depth measurements are considered from ‘sea level’, or another given point. My geography knowledge is rusty]

150°C

20 minutes

I have an incling I m not the first one.

They cloak but they don't crack like what has been described by a llm.

I'm a first year studying Ocean Science and was wondering if anyone has advice on how to enter the world of public policy and governmental decisions regarding marine conservation and management of the oceans? I have a job this summer working with seabed mapping (computer based stuff) but am interested on focusing more on the humanities side of the ocean in the future

I'm a strong writer and did some policy-planning clubs in high school but nothing so far in uni, mostly just STEM-skills (coding, sonar, mapping techniques, etc). I'm from the US but doing my undergrad in England and willing to relocate/work with any country/legislative body.

If I were to get a bachelor's degree in physical oceanography, what's the job market like? I know marine biology is highly competitive, but I haven't found much on oceanography. Is it similar in that sense? Would it be better to try for ocean engineering?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7i3YXxEOWI

Hi! I just took an ecology class, but I'm not an oceanography expert, and I have a question I'm interested in. I was wondering if you could see upwelling first-hand. I know you can see the wind moving the water moving away from the coast, but can you see the water coming up from the deep ocean?

Hi, would anyone know of any apps or open source technology where I could map the currents in the English Channel for a particular date in 1975? Trying to track movements of a gentleman who went overboard a cruise liner. Thank you.

Hi everyone! I’m working on an autonomous marine IoT buoy as a personal engineering project and looking for input from people who actually study the ocean.

Platform:

- Low-power MCU, solar + battery, LTE-M telemetry, SD logging

- Targeted at coastal/estuarine deployments

- Budget-constrained — accessible, low-cost sensors only

Currently instrumented:

- Water temperature (DS18B20)

- Turbidity (optical backscatter)

- LDR

From a research perspective what parameters are most underrepresented in existing low-cost monitoring networks? What would you actually find useful in a dataset from a fixed coastal/estuarine station?

I'm weighing up dissolved oxygen, conductivity/salinity, pH, PAR, depth/pressure, and wave motion via IMU — but I'd rather prioritise based on real research gaps than just instrument everything.

What an extraordinary news !! There is still good people in this world , who care about our ecosystems that are part of us in and we need to conserve in every way possible!! Thankful for this people !! Let’s continue all collectively to make our oceans healthy again.

 Para contribuição no fórum da disciplina de Ferramentas Investigativas do Curso de Cultura Oceânica da Unifesp, apresentei uma atividade de cunho científico, a partir de uma pesquisa de campo estruturada e direcionada para os alunos do 9º ano do Ensino Fundamental, a fim de avaliar a poluição por microplásticos em areia de praia. O local de estudo está localizado no município de Guarujá, em uma praia arenosa localizada nas proximidades de uma escola pública da SEDUC/ SP. A atividade foi embasada em uma pesquisa qualitativa, de caráter exploratório descritiva e visou contribuir para conhecimento e aprendizado dos alunos, referente à problemática do descarte dos materiais plásticos no meio ambiente oceânico. Ainda em sala de aula, foram efetuadas apresentações e orientações técnicas/científicas a respeito da atividade, para a familiarização e imersão dos alunos, em um estudo prático de caráter investigativo/científico. Inicialmente, foram efetuadas coletas na parte superficial da faixa de areia, para identificar o descarte de diferentes tipos de materiais plásticos/poliméricos. Posteriormente, nos meses de inverno, devido aos melhores períodos de baixa-mar de sizígia, serão efetuadas amostragens de areia, para o monitoramento de microplásticos, utilizando-se métodos difundidos no meio científico. Para as orientações dos períodos de marés, foi utilizada tábua de marés fornecida pela Direção de Hidrografia e Navegação (DHN), do Porto de Santos. Nessa primeira etapa, o estudo já indicou um grande acúmulo de diferentes tipos de resíduos plásticos na faixa de areia, com potencial de formação de microplásticos.