Lani Ngonethong

TREASURE TROVE. Ocean exploration has benefited humanity from medicine to predicting severe weather. (Canva: vilp58, Kileen Nicole Art and CreativeValuation

Arguably the biggest natural threat to humanity right now is climate change. Five of the top ten hottest years on record have been from the past 20 years including the hottest year on average: 2023. Also, severe weather events caused by climate change have increased as well. While space travel won’t help us in the fight against climate change; ocean exploration can help us understand changes in our climate as well as severe weather events.

Organizations such as the United States Geological Survey(USGS) use resolution bathymetric maps to map the ocean floor. These are crucial for understanding and identifying sensitive marine environments as well as geological hazards such as tsunamis. However, only about 20 percent of the ocean floor has been mapped so far. Currently, USGS and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as well as Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) are mapping and are doing autonomous environmental DNA sampling to gather information of Hawaii’s abyssal plain.

Some modern day antibiotics have been developed through ocean exploration. Most Modern day antibiotics come from flowers and plants, but also a lot come from the ocean such as Antibiotic Ecteinascidin, which is used as a treatment for breast cancer, and Discodermolide, which is an antitumor agent. This is due to the ocean’s incredible biodiversity. NOAA scientists have found chemicals that can combat the worst bacterias including one that breaks down the shield that bacteria uses to protect itself. After they find said chemical they recreate it in a lab in order to keep the ocean healthy and can study it more to make medicine.

When discussing exploration, space exploration usually comes to mind first. Space exploration, especially deep space exploration, gives humanity a better understanding of our universe. It furthers our understanding on how earth fits into our solar system as well as the universe. It inspires a new generation of great thinkers as well as artists. Also, it unites us so we can improve and advance our technology to gain an even deeper understanding of space. Finally, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tracks our changing climate allowing scientists to figure out how each change correlates with our rapidly changing climate.

However, ocean exploration has benefited the world from new discoveries that have revolutionized modern day medicine to maps that might be able to help us prevent extreme severe weather events. So why isn’t the U.S. funding these explorations more? The answer is embedded into the space program.

NASA is supplied with over 30 billion dollars worth of funding from the U.S. government. In fact, this year The U.S. government is going to spend 34 billion dollars on NASA meanwhile it will only spend around 46 million dollars annually on ocean exploration. To put this into perspective NASA receives more than 600 times the funding that ocean exploration receives. This gap in funding is astounding because ocean exploration can and has helped humanity just as much, if not more, as space exploration.

Ocean exploration holds the keys to preventing climate change and advancing modern day medicine. So if we want to understand the Earth and prevent climate change, let’s invest more into ocean exploration.