Tag: GEBCO

The Seabed 2030 project announced on Saturday that “27.3% of the world’s ocean floor has now been mapped to modern standards. The increase in data represents more than four million square kilometres of newly mapped seafloor—an area roughly equivalent to the entire Indian subcontinent.” The above map shows the progress to date, with new bathymetric data added over the past year indicated in red. Data compiled by this project is freely available via GEBCO’s global grid.

Previously: Mapping the Ocean Floor by 2030; ‘Cartographically Speaking, Water Sucks’.

Newsweek looks at efforts by a group of scientists and mariners to map most of the ocean floor by the year 2030. The objective was endorsed by a meeting of GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, last June. The scale of the project is vast:

To date, more than 85 percent of the seafloor has not been mapped using modern methods. Since 70 percent of the Earth is covered in oceans, this means that we quite literally don’t know our own planet. “We know the surface of Mars better than we do the seafloor,” says Martin Jakobsson, a researcher at Stockholm University.

[Leventhal/MAPS-L]