Mermaids may not exist, but the ocean is still full of mysteries.
Those large, beautiful bodies of water are home to an infinite number of strange creatures and bewildering phenomena. The average ocean depth is 14,000 feet deep — that leaves a lot of room for the mysterious, the mythical and everything in between.
"The ocean is 95% unexplored, unknown, unseen by human eyes," Fred Gorell, the head of public affairs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Exploration and Research division, tells Mashable in an interview. "Every time we go off on an expedition, we see something new, or something believed to be new."
As such, there's a literal world of phenomena left to explore and explain. For Gorell, one of the most iconic examples of just how unknown the ocean is comes from a camera project around 2004. Dubbed Operation Deep Scope, a team of explorers placed a non-obtrusive camera on the bottom of the deep ocean off the Gulf of Mexico. In an instant, a new discovery was made.
"This one camera in one place in less than a minute of operation imaged a video of a six-foot squid that had never been seen before, not known to exist with us on the planet," Gorell says. " How many other mysteries are in the ocean?"
It's a seemingly endless number, especially when you factor in the incredibly tough work of sea exploration. The ocean's expansiveness requires a huge number of people to vigilantly keep watch on underwater cameras. It would take a NOAA explorer an "extraordinarily [huge] part of their future life" to study the images coming in from ongoing expeditions, Gorell says frankly. For the near future, your curiosities about the Bermuda Triangle will have to go unsolved for now.
Here are five ocean mysteries science still hasn't solved.