15 million squares miles of unknown

Well not guite. It is 14 million square miles. And we know a little. But it is oddly reassuring that there is so little we know about so much. Humility is out of fashion but its need never went away.

From There's a 'Desert' in The Middle of The Pacific, And We Now Know What Lives There by Peter Dockrill

In the centre of the South Pacific, there's a place as far away from land as anyone on Earth could ever hope to get. The ocean is different there.

These distant waters lie at the heart of the South Pacific Gyre, the centre of which holds the 'oceanic pole of inaccessibility': the ocean's remotest extreme, aka Point Nemo (a name meaning 'no-one'), famous otherwise for being a spacecraft cemetery.

But aside from the ghosts of burnt-up satellites, what dwells under these far-off waves?

Not much, scientists have long thought. Despite taking up 10 percent of the ocean's surface, the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) – the largest of Earth's five giant ocean-spanning current systems – is generally considered a 'desert' in terms of marine biology.

Nonetheless, stuff does live there, even if organic life in these waters (and the seabed below it) is few and far between, due to a range of factors.

These include distance from land (and the nutrient matter it provides), the way water swirling currents isolate the centre of the gyre from the rest of the ocean, and high UV levels in this part of the ocean.

In truth, though, we don't actually know all that much about the life-forms that inhabit the SPG, largely because of how hard it is to study this oceanic desert – due to both its extreme remoteness, and also how large it is, covering about 37 million square kilometres (14 million square miles).