I remember reading somewhere about some organization (not Google) hoping to map the entire ocean floor by sometime in the 2020s, but it is truly a gargantuan un

I remember reading somewhere about some organization (not Google) hoping to map the entire ocean floor by sometime in the 2020s, but it is truly a gargantuan undertaking. As you say, we have far better mappings of the moon than we do of the ocean, and for good reason. The data report [0] from the MH370 search offers good insight for how little we know of the ocean, and why it is so difficult to map in its entirety. Two points really stood out to me from their findings: 1) the current quality of our topographical maps and other images are low quality and mostly unhelpful for any sort of real research or analysis; 2) it took 3 years of dedicated masses of search teams from multiple countries just to produce quality maps of a tiny stretch of one part of one ocean. To put numbers behind it, the MH370 report referenced above calculated their entire mapping efforts this way: "The search for MH370 collected 278,000 square kilometres of bathymetry data within the search area and 710,000 square kilometres of data in total, which includes the data acquired in transit between port and the search area. It is one of the largest marine surveys ever conducted." That's a lot of time (3 years), money ($160M, granted not all spent on mapping), and people, for a good chunk of sea floor. But the oceans comprise 360,000,000 square kilometers. Three years of dedicated, coordinated searching in the "largest marine survey" ever only mapped 0.2% of the ocean floor. So who knows what sort of motivation, incentives, time, and organizations it will take to get 100%. [0] https://geoscience-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=038a72439bfa4d28b3dde81cc6ff3214 https://geoscience-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.htm...