Volcanoes get all the headlines. Flashy, photogenic, and conveniently villainous. They belch some ash and gas into the atmosphere, and we wring our hands as if they’ve single-handedly rewritten the climate. But they’re just the theatrical tip of the iceberg—loud, visible, and vastly overrepresented in the narrative.
The bigger players are silent. And ignored.
Seventy-one percent of Earth’s surface is ocean. A vast, roiling wilderness with virtually no permanent human footprint. Push just ten miles offshore and you’re in a realm almost no one sees—except maybe a few trawler captains and the occasional masochistic sailor. The sea is the planet’s dominant feature, and we treat it like a blue smudge on a weather map.
But the story doesn’t end there. Of the remaining 29% of land, about 10% is desert—scorching or frozen, it doesn’t matter. Both are equally empty. Another 8% is tundra and taiga—again, inhospitable and mostly untouched.
Roughly 14.6% of Earth’s surface has been reshaped by human hands. That’s it. That’s our little sandbox. Everything else—85% of the planet—is as foreign to the average person as the far side of the Moon. We don’t live there. We don’t observe it. We barely even acknowledge it exists unless a satellite pings something strange.
And yet we pretend to model the whole system. We speak with solemn conviction about global trends, climate projections, planetary-scale predictions—while most of what the planet actually does is happening out of sight, out of reach, and far out of our intellectual depth.
Take ocean outgassing, for example—just one of many phenomena in the unobserved wilds. Invisible. Massive. Largely unmeasured.We want to chart the Earth, but we’re drawing it from inside a small lit room, surrounded by fog, guessing wildly at what’s going on outside. And calling it science.