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A concerted international effort is now underway to make a detailed map of life on the biggest and most unexplored region of this planet. Although water covers 70% of the surface of the globe, most of the oceans and seas are totally unexplored. The surface of Venus has been better mapped than the underwater world!

According to a recent report in The Guardian newspaper, this census of marine life is being conducted by scientists from more than 70 nations, who hope to create an “information seaway” – a regional network of new and existing scientific records.

The Guardian reported this comment from Frederick Grassle, of Rutgers University in the US:

“We have barely skimmed the surface. Humans have explored less than 5% of the world’s oceans, and even where we have explored, life may have been too small to see. Thus, opportunities abound to discover species and increase our knowledge of abundance and distribution.”

So far, taxonomists have named and described around 230,000 species of marine creature. But there could be ten times as many still to be identified. The census has already added an average of more than two new species a week.

In his article, the Guardian’s Science Editor commented:

“Life on earth is a mystery: life in the oceans is an even deeper mystery.”

But with so much left to learn about life on this planet, surely there is every reason to expect even more information to come to the surface that supports belief in the wisdom of its Creator, who alone knows the mystery of life itself.

The Bible records that in the beginning, when “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep…the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2) and created life both above and below the surface of the oceans. That same wisdom that created the world in the beginning also “measured the waters in the hollow of his hand” (Isaiah 40:12), creating an aquatic world that is only now starting to be understood by science.

So life in most of the deep oceans is still a mystery to the world of science, needing a survey costing $1bn to plumb its depths. In contrast, reading the Bible is free to those who want to know more about the God who created this world and everything in it!