Many maps of the ocean floor are decades old. The race is on to properly chart them by 2030 – and crowdsourcing could be part of the answer.
Tucked inside a federal government building in the American Rockies is the world's best collection of seafloor maps. Occasionally a hard drive arrives in the mail, filled with new bathymetric – or seafloor – charts collected by survey vessels and research ships cruising the seas. The world's largest public map of Earth's oceans grows just a little bit more.
One organisation wants to change this – and quickly. In 2023, Seabed 2030 announced that its latest map of the entire seafloor isSo far, the DCDB holds over 40 compressed terabytes of seafloor data. The biggest contributor is the US academic fleet:owned by American universities which constantly circle the globe studying the deep ocean.
"Crowdsourced bathymetry came about a few years ago when the IHO was saying: 'At this rate, we're never going to map the whole darn ocean; we need to start looking outside the box,'" saysBy attaching a data logger to a boat's echosounder, any vessel can build a simple map of the seafloor. This is crucial in developing coastal and island nations.
The military or commercial value of nautical charts will always be a barrier to achieving complete coverage of the world map In a world where only a quarter of the seafloor is charted, there's still an advantage in knowing more than your rivals. Niwa's Mackay experienced this himself on a scientific-mapping expedition. He received a call from a military he chooses not to name and"they said 'you need to destroy that data because there was military value in what you're mapping, because it's a place where submarines like to hide'," he recalls.
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