The ocean is full of surprises. You might imagine the abyss as a silent, monotonous plane, but surprise after surprise is emerging from its depths. In one particularly poetic revelation, explorers have uncovered a colossal underwater mountain—a seamount—rising more than twice the height of the world’s tallest building. It is a vivid reminder that even now, Earth hides wonders that beckon us to look deeper, and to imagine again.
The Discovery
During a recent expedition aboard the research vessel Falkor (too), scientists mapping the seabed off Guatemala encountered something truly extraordinary: a cone-shaped seamount rising 5,250 feet (1,600 m) above the ocean floor, buried beneath 7,870 feet (2,400 m) of seawater. It lies in international waters of the Pacific, roughly 97 miles (156 km) from Guatemalan territory.
The vast underwater mountain stretches across roughly 14 square kilometers (about 5.4 square miles). Its discovery revealed just how unexplored and mysterious much of the ocean still is. Researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute noted that finding a structure over 1.5 kilometers tall, hidden beneath the waves until now, underscores how little we truly know about our planet’s depths.
They emphasized that although science has uncovered much about Earth’s oceans, an even greater portion remains a frontier waiting to be explored.
The discovery was made using multibeam sonar mapping across a six-day transit from Costa Rica to the East Pacific Rise—a tectonic boundary zone.
Seamounts like this one are often extinct volcanoes, once active but now dormant. Over geological timescales, they may have grown to reach the sea surface, eroded, and then subsided back beneath the waves, forming “guyots” or flat-topped seamounts.
Life In The Dark, And The Significance Of The Fourth Point
Here is where the story shifts from geological marvel to ecological and existential wonder—the moment that defines the discovery’s true importance. The seafloor, though remote and shadowed, is not lifeless. Seamounts provide rare rocky habitat in an otherwise muddy, largely featureless ocean bed, offering surfaces where corals, sponges, and a diversity of invertebrates can anchor and thrive.
Jon Copley, deep-sea ecologist at the University of Southampton, explained that when a structure rises from the seafloor, it creates strong currents that allow filter feeders to grow upward and catch food. In short: these formations are not inert monuments; they are living beacons in a vast underwater desert.
Even more provocatively, this discovery is part of a pattern of astonishing finds: in the same region of the Pacific, scientists have recently located four other colossal seamounts using gravitational anomaly detection. The tallest among them soars 8,796 feet (2,681 m) above the sea floor—nearly three times taller than the Burj Khalifa.
The team identified the hidden formations by analyzing gravitational anomalies—tiny bulges in the ocean’s surface that hint at massive structures below. This subtle shift in gravity provided the crucial clue that led researchers to uncover the towering seamounts concealed beneath the waves.
This fourth point—the deeper implication—is breathtaking. The ocean’s interior is deeply connected in ways we are only beginning to glimpse. These seamounts not only sustain ecosystems but also steer oceanic currents, influence chemical transport, and might even connect to tectonic and volcanic dynamics. They remind us that Earth’s geology and biology are interwoven, even in the deepest darkness.
Beyond One Seamount: The Broader Frontier
While this particular seamount has drawn attention, it is by no means unique in its mystery. Satellite and bathymetric models suggest there may be over 100,000 seamounts taller than 1,000 m scattered across the global oceans—yet only a fraction have been mapped in high resolution.
In fact, some newly discovered peaks dwarf even our current find. In one expedition off Peru and Chile, the Schmidt Ocean Institute team located four major seamounts, the tallest rising more than 8,800 feet above the seafloor. CNN has also reported a seamount off Chile exceeding 3,000 m in height—almost quadruple the height of the Burj Khalifa—discovered during a 28-day voyage with Falkor (too).
Yet globally, only about 25-26 % of the seabed has been mapped at high resolution, meaning that vast underwater landscapes remain dark to us.
The mapping work is guided by Seabed 2030, a global initiative to chart the entirety of the seafloor by decade’s end—a truly audacious goal. Together, the Schmidt Ocean Institute and its partners are pivotal contributors to this vision.
A Narrative Moment: Imagining A Diver’s Awe
Let us imagine a marine scientist aboard Falkor (too), staring over the ship’s rail into the abyss, confident of nothing but curiosity. The sonar ping returns—a ripple of data, glowing on a screen, drawing a mountain from darkness. In that instant, science becomes magic: rock rises in the void; life may cling to its flanks; connections to global systems tremble just beneath the data.
Later, she may discuss with colleagues, marveling that they “weren’t even looking for this”—yet the ocean has a way of revealing itself when we pause, pay attention, and map with humility.
And when the specimen lives—corals delicately formed, sponges filtering the silent currents, invertebrates drifting through narrow fissures—we see an ecological thread spun into the vast web of ocean life. That thread links us, too: we depend on the oceans for climate, for chemistry, for sustaining life across continents. These discoveries are not just geological curiosities—they are chapters in Earth’s living story.
Optimism Beneath The Waves
In a time when much news worries us, the ocean offers a counterpoint: mystery, discovery, connection. Each hidden mountain brought into light testifies to how much remains uncharted—and how our curiosity still matters.
By 2030, if Seabed 2030 succeeds, the entire ocean floor may be mapped. That means more giants may surface in our instruments, more ecosystems may demand protection, and more knowledge can inform how we protect fragile marine realms. The mountain off Guatemala might be just one star in a constellation of underwater wonder.
As the researchers observed, this discovery “really highlights how much we have yet to discover.” Let that be an invitation, not a lament: the ocean is not lost. It is waiting.
Sources:
Schmidt Ocean
Live Science
