Check Out Beautiful Sonar Images of the Seafloor Near Hawaii

[Narrator] Science knows more about the surface

of the moon than the bottom of the sea,

or so the old cliche goes.

Well guess what.

No one's ever fired SONAR at the moon before,

mostly because, well, there's no sound in space.

The research vessel Falkor, yes,

as in The Never Ending Story, just mapped

more than 4,000 square miles of seafloor

in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument,

which is a mouthful.

That's the giant protected area southwest of Hawaii

that Obama christened.

Scientists with the Schmidt Ocean Institute

built these incredible images with multi beam SONAR,

which fires hundreds of pings at once

to form a ribbon of sound.

This gave the team incredible accuracy,

on the scale of mere meters.

By steaming the research vessel back and forth,

they painted a picture with sound in neat strips.

Think of it like mowing a lawn, only way more expensive.

And this is more than just painting pretty pictures.

Scientists can actually infer where life

might flourish from these images.

Peaks and ridges help accelerate the flow of water.

This brings plankton, which feeds critters like sponges.

So if you've got yourself a submersible

that costs thousands of dollars a day to run,

you'll want to know where to find the most life.

So take that, moon!

You wish you had life too.