I know space gets a lot of press as the final frontier, but for my money, the ocean is the bigger mystery – and it’s a lot closer to home.

Experts estimate there could be thousands of species down there that we’ve never seen before, but this new method of mapping could jump start new discoveries sooner rather than later.

Global initiative Seabed 2030 has stated a goal of mapping the entire ocean floor by the 2030, which is extremely ambitious by most standards. That said, they believe there are a couple of recent technological developments that could make it achievable.

One is new coastal mapping that’s delivered data from 13 different countries, resulting in 84,000 square miles of coverage, including many previously uncharted regions. The results were courtesy of the Greenwater Foundation, with the financial backing of Victor Vescovo’s Caladan Oceanic.

They’re using light instead of sonar when mapping coastal areas less than 100 feet in depth, and employing satellite-derived bathymetry to avoid the time and fuel costs of traditional boats or airplanes.

Vescovo spoke with IFLSience about the scope of their accomplishments.

“We were able just last year to map a quarter of a million square kilometers for approximately $2 per square kilometer, which is in order of magnitude cheaper than you could ever have done it. In shallow water, sonar beams can’t travel very far. So the amount of area you can map using sonar with a ship is very small, which makes it very cost-ineffective. But a satellite can view vast areas all at once.”

They are currently looking into ways that AI could assist operators to create more maps quicker and for less money. They’d like to reduce that cost to $1 per square kilometer.

Vescovo has been fascinated with the ocean since he made a goal to be the first person to dive to the deepest depth in all five oceans, only to learn that we didn’t actually know the deepest point in four of those five oceans.

Since then, he has been focused on reducing the cost of mapping the remaining unknown 74% of the ocean floor. He’s proposing that, for deeper spots where light cannot reach but that are still within a certain distance from the shore, automated vehicles could do the mapping via sonar.

“That’s where the ship that I’m designing and hopefully will build in the next two years will come to the fore. With a crew of just one person, maybe two, it will effectively be a semi-autonomous ship that will go out for two to three weeks at a time and run large tracks with the most powerful mapping sonar you can put on a civilian vessel, the Kongsberg EM124. That is a sonar that can map thousands of square kilometers per day because that’s what it’s designed to do. And you have the depth to get a large swath of area.”

We’re sitting at around 300 million square kilometers of ocean floor that remains a total a mystery, but at $1 km, it starts to look a lot more feasible for private and public researchers.

And people like Vescovo passionately believe that the end result would be worth it, as he told IFLScience in this interview.

“There is a good reason why we haven’t mapped the seafloor: it’s not worth that much directly, but I think in terms of a common good, it is. From helping with navigation for ships so they don’t run itno sea mounts or shoals that they don’t know about, to mapping the tidal areas and the ocean current areas to help with climate modeling, all of those are common goods that are hard to get funded, but if we make it cheap enough, maybe we are to make it approachable.”

Currently, we know more about the surface of both Mars and the Moon than we do about the bottoms of the oceans on our own planet, which is wild to think about.

But Vescovo believes that, for a paltry $3-$5 million bucks, we could change all of that in the next five years.

Only time will tell, so for now, all we can do is wait.

That said, it does sound like knowledge might already be on its way.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.