Sasha Barbagat

a listener production.

Hi, Sasha Barbagat with you.

Welcome to The Briefing.

In the last 12 months alone, more than 1,100 new species have been discovered in our oceans, and it's believed more than three quarters of the world's seas are still undiscovered.

With today being World Oceans Day, we are diving into the deep sea to find out all the things we do and don't know about it.

That's coming up after the headlines with the Listener Newsroom on Monday the 8th of June.

A big thanks to the listener newsroom for today's headlines.

Now it is time for today's deep dive.

And when you think of the ocean, what do you picture?

Maybe your favourite beach or bay, the Great Barrier Reef or vast expanses of blue under a giant cruise ship.

While our own experiences of the sea are limited to the surface, the very health and future of the ocean we can see is driven by what we can't, thousands and thousands of kilometres down.

And it's there in the deep sea that a whole world exists,

cavernous trenches, underwater mountains and bizarre species and so much of it remains unseen and undiscovered by human eyes or technology.

So this World Oceans Day we are chatting with a CSIRO scientist who was part of a team that recently discovered more than 1100 new species, many of which swim deep down in waters off the coast of Australia.

He'll share with us what we do and don't know about a place that covers half the Earth's surface and why its very existence is critical to our planet.

Dr Will White is from the CSIRO and the Australian National Fish Collection and he joins me now.

Welcome to The Briefing, Dr White.

First off, can you tell us a little bit about the deep ocean?

What does it cover and how much is still undiscovered?

Yeah.