Three Parts of the World We’re Still Discovering

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Three Parts of the World We’re Still Discovering

For all the people who dreamed of being explorers as kids before they learned what colonialism is, it can feel like there’s nothing on Earth left to discover. At a certain point, a lot of them abandoned the planet altogether and started looking up (it was 1995, the year Apollo 13 came out). But this here world is pretty big, and we’re still finding new things on it every single day. Such as…

Dinosaurs

Speaking of movies from the mid-‘90s that brought massive attention to certain branches of science, paleontology might nevertheless seem like, well, a dead science. After all, every dinosaur that ever lived has died, so there’s a finite number of ‘em out there in the ground. But we’ve only really been looking for them for about 150 years, and there are untold different kinds, so we’re still identifying a new species of dinosaur roughly every two weeks. In fact, much of the fossil record is just gone forever, so we’ll literally never identify every dinosaur. Not unless we come across the right mosquito, at least.

Living Species

In that sense, you’d think it would actually be easier to catalog every species that still exists on this planet. Aside from the horrors lurking in the unexplored caverns of the deep sea, we’ve been to, like, all of it, so there’s nowhere to hide. But the identification of new living species crushes that of dinosaurs several times over. In 2023 alone, we identified 815 new species. Hell, just Googling “new species of fish” will suck you into a seemingly alternate universe where a new fish drops every other day. You ever seen a walking fish? Shit’s terrifying out there.

Oceans

When would you say the last ocean was discovered? Could we even put a date on it? They’ve been there since continental drift wrecked Pangea, and even before then, they were just chilling together. But scientists recently found an entirely new ocean underneath the ground. It’s three times the volume of all the rest of the oceans on Earth, almost 500 miles beneath the United States, and it’s inspired new theories that the planet’s water came from deep inside rather than extraterrestrially, as was previously believed (yes, seriously). No wonder they keep finding so many fucking fish.

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