Abstract
Despite many of years of mapping effort, only a small fraction of the world ocean’s seafloor has been sampled for depth, greatly limiting our ability to explore and understand critical ocean and seafloor processes. Recognizing this poor state of our knowledge of ocean depths and the critical role such knowledge plays in understanding and maintaining our planet, GEBCO and the Nippon Foundation have joined forces to establish the Nippon Foundation GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, an international effort with the objective of facilitating the complete mapping of the world ocean by 2030. The Seabed 2030 Project will establish globally distributed regional data assembly and coordination centers (RDACCs) that will identify existing data from their assigned regions that are not currently in publicly available databases and seek to make these data available. They will develop protocols for data collection (including resolution goals) and common software and other tools to assemble and attribute appropriate metadata as they assimilate regional grids using standardized techniques. A Global Data Assembly and Coordination Center (GDACC) will integrate the regional grids into a global grid and distribute to users world-wide. The GDACC will also act as the central focal point for the coordination of common data standards and processing tools as well as the outreach coordinator for Seabed 2030 efforts. The GDACC and RDACCs will collaborate with existing data centers and bathymetric compilation efforts. Finally, the Nippon Foundation GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project will encourage and help coordinate and track new survey efforts and facilitate the development of new and innovative technologies that can increase the efficiency of seafloor mapping and thus make the ambitious goals of Seabed 2030 more likely to be achieved.
Highlights
The oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface [1], are fundamental to sustaining life, controlling climate, facilitating commerce and they represent a vast source of resources and economic wealth.Our understanding of the ocean and natural processes occurring at the seafloor is quite limited due to the difficulties in operating in this environment, especially the fact that electromagnetic waves,(e.g., light and radar), are highly attenuated in ocean water
While satellite altimetry-derived bathymetry is excellent for a regional tectonic studies (e.g., [4]), it does not provide enough spatial resolution or accuracy to perform the detailed geomorphometric analyses [5] required to understand the origin and significance of, for example, bottom current features [6], submarine glacial landforms [7], benthic habitats [8,9,10], geohazards such as shallow faults [11,12], pockmarks, or mass transport complexes [13]
Of particular relevance with respect to geomorphometry, we present these issues in the context of relevance with respect to geomorphometry, we present these issues in the context of geomorphometric geomorphometric analyses and address the critical question “at what resolution should Seabed 2030 analyses and address the critical question “at what resolution should Seabed 2030 aim to map the aim to map the world’s ocean’s floors?”
Summary
The oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface [1], are fundamental to sustaining life, controlling climate, facilitating commerce and they represent a vast source of resources and economic wealth. Given the scale of these figures, each of the track-lines shown covers a width of 100s of kilometers while in reality, a multibeam swath is typically on the order of four times the water depth (~16 km in 4000 m water depth) and a single beam would ensonify a diameter of approximately 2 km in 4000 m water depth Lines this thin would be impossible to display on global (or even regional-scale) maps and one gets the impression of much greater coverage than exists. Satellite altimetry-derived bathymetry is, far less precise than echo sounder-derived data and has far less resolution than modern multibeam sonars, but the method is objective and, in most areas without sea ice, superior to interpolation between sparse ship tracks by mathematical algorithms or hand-contouring.
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