Endorsement of Global Ocean Mapping Project

Now that the surfaces of the Moon, Mars, Venus, the moons of the outer solar system, and the subaerial Earth have been mapped systematically at high spatial resolution, why not our own Earth's ocean floors? Some 370 million km 2 of our planet, almost equal in area to two moons and two Mars‐sized planets, are water‐covered, and seafloor mapping efforts (for practical reasons, acoustic, sonar images, and topographic contours) have yielded only an irregular patchwork of disparate data, with large areas of remote seafloor remaining almost entirely unmapped.