The data available to conclude to the definitive map of the world’s ocean floor has more than doubled, two years after the start of an international effort to produce a complete map by 2030. Namely, after the efforts of the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, coverage of the world’s ocean floor has grew from 6% to 15%.
This is equal to about 32,000,000 square kilometres of new bathymetric data.
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The project’s attempts to map the ocean floor received a dual boost during May, as a team consisting of the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Postgraduate Training Programme at the University of New Hampshire, US, had won the $4 million grand prize in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE. This is a competition to advance technological innovation in ocean mapping.
In addition, XPRIZE and Seabed 2030 will cooperate to enhance cooperation in mapping the world’s entire ocean floor.
A complete map of the world’s ocean will enable a better understanding of processes such as ocean circulation, benthic habitat distributions, weather systems, tides, sediment transport, tsunami wave propagation, and climate change.
The depiction of ocean floor topography will also help recognize underwater dangers and inform sustainable marine resource management and infrastructure development, which are crucial to the future of ocean exploration.
Seabed 2030 was launched in 2017 as a collaborative international project, aiming to produce a complete map of the world’s ocean floor by 2030. To manage this, Seabed 2030 uses all currently available data into the GEBCO grid, identifies existing data not in publicly available databases and seeks to include them, identifies the areas for which no data exist, and inspires and informs future mapping missions in these areas.
According to the assessments made by Seabed 2030, no more than 20% of the ocean floor has been mapped with modern survey instruments, and not all of these data were added in the 2014 GEBCO grid.
