The race to map the ocean floor – 10/16/2023 – Science

Hidden in 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, full of new bathymetric — or seafloor — charts collected by research ships. The largest public map of Earth’s oceans grows a little bigger.

Hidden by the ocean, the seabed has resisted human exploration for centuries.

Folklore and myths speak of it as the home of terrible sea monsters, gods, goddesses and lost underwater cities.

Victorian-era sailors believed there was no ocean floor, just an infinite abyss where the bodies of drowned sailors rested in a watery purgatory.

Over the last century, modern scientific techniques and sonar have revealed a little-understood seascape of crusty brine lakes, smoldering volcanoes and vast, undulating underwater plains.

But we are still in our infancy in mapping and exploring this huge underwater world.

Data base

One organization wants to change that – and quickly. In 2023, the Seabed 2030 project announced that its latest map of the entire seabed is nearly 25% complete.

The data to make the first publicly available map of the underwater world is stored at the International Hydrographic Organization’s (IHO) Digital Bathymetry Data Center (DCDB) in a government building in Boulder, Colorado.

So far, the DCDB contains more than 40 compressed terabytes of deep-sea data. The biggest contributor is the US academic fleet: 17 research ships owned by American universities that constantly circle the globe studying the depths of the ocean.

Other contributors include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fleet, the Irish Geological Survey and the German Federal Hydrographic and Maritime Agency.

The biggest users are scientists from around the world who rely on the data to conduct research.

Seabed 2030 has made extraordinary progress by asking countries and companies to share their maps with the DCDB. But unfortunately, the map isn’t growing fast enough.

Between 2016 and 2021, the map went from 6% to 20%. Since then, the pace has slowed. In 2022, it reached only 23.3% completion. In 2023, 24.9%. Ocean mappers have come up with a new plan: crowdfunding.

“Collaborative bathymetry came about a few years ago when IHO was saying, ‘At this rate, we’re never going to be able to map the whole damn ocean. We need to start looking outside the box,'” says Jennifer Jencks, director of the DCDB and president of a group of crowdfunding work at OHI.

By connecting a data logger to a boat’s echosounder, any vessel can construct a simple map of the seafloor. This is crucial in the development of coastal and island nations.

Tion Uriam, head of the Hydrographic Unit at the Ministry of Communications, Transport and Tourism Development of the Republic of Kiribati, recently received two data loggers that they plan to install on local ferries. “It’s a victory to be part of this initiative,” he says.

“We want to be part of a global effort. Our contribution may be small, but it is a contribution.”

Kiribati is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean with around 130,000 inhabitants spread across 33 coral atolls, of which only 20 are inhabited. British charts published in the 1950s and 1960s have been the most accurate maps of the region to date.

The United Kingdom and the United States claimed several islands as protectorates or territories, exploiting them for phosphate or using them as whaling stations. Other British maps used are old and inaccurate.

Some date back to the late Victorian era or list depth measurements in fathoms, which most countries have changed over the years (the US only removed them in 2021).

This isn’t all that uncommon in the Pacific, according to marine geologist Kevin Mackay, who oversees the Seabed 2030 South and Western Pacific Regional Center at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) in the capital Wellington.

“The big problem in the Pacific is the legacy of the colonial system. So in the Pacific, who takes care of the mapping? Is it the Americans through their territories, or the United Kingdom through their territories, or the French and their islands, although they now are officially independent.”

Kiribati gained independence in 1979, but there has been little progress in topography research since then. In 2020, the World Bank financed a US$42 million (around R$200 million) project to improve maritime infrastructure on the islands. A portion of this will go towards mapping the seabed.

Being one of the least developed countries in the world, most of the i-Kiribati (the name of the inhabitants of Kiribati) live in the capital of South Tawara: a 17 km² crescent-shaped atoll with a population density equal to that of Tokyo.

More people are flocking to the capital in search of a modern life, while the rest live on remote islands where poverty and unemployment are high, amenities are poor and the long-term future is uncertain due to rising sea levels and to strong tropical storms.

Better maps proved they could boost trade, traffic and tourism on the islands. They could help communities plan for tsunamis, storms and sea level rise.

Many islands do not have basic tide gauges and therefore visiting ships time their arrival for high tide. In meetings with government ministers, Uriam tries to highlight the economic benefits of improving Kiribati’s nautical maps.

However, there is a hitch when it comes to sharing maps with the DCDB archive in Boulder. About a third of the IHO’s 98 member states allow crowdsourcing within territorial waters.

However, the Pacific island nations of Kiribati, the Independent State of Samoa and the Cook Islands, which recently received Seabed 2030 data loggers, are not among them. Until governments give their approval, the new crowdsourced maps will remain secret.

Despite the publicly stated scientific objective of Seabed 2030, the military or commercial value of nautical charts will always be a barrier to achieving complete coverage of the world map.

“Marine charts, by their very nature, were destined to be withdrawn from the academic domain and general circulation,” wrote map historian Lloyd Brown in his book The Story of Maps. “They were much more than an aid to navigation; they were, in fact, the key to empire, the path to wealth.”

In a world where only a quarter of the seafloor is mapped, there is still an advantage in knowing more than your rivals. Mackay of Niwa himself experienced this on a scientific mapping expedition.

He got a call from a military man who preferred to remain anonymous and “they said ‘you need to destroy this data because there’s military value in what you’re mapping, because it’s a place where submarines like to hide,'” he recalls.

“Obviously, we ignore them because we’re (mapping) for science, we don’t care. But the military finds a lot of value in bathymetry that as scientists we don’t even think about.”

For some countries, it is also suspicious that the DCDB is based in the United States, which has the most powerful armed forces in the world.

“We are also concerned that DCDB is hosted by the United States. Not everyone likes this,” says Jencks.

She attempts to assuage these concerns by pointing out that the DCDB was endorsed by all IHO member states when it was created in 1990.

In Kiribati, the challenges are less political and more practical, according to Uriam. His position as head of the Hydrographic Unit only became permanent about a year ago. Previously, he worked in the fisheries department and already knew how difficult it is to share data between departments, especially with outsiders.

There are also hurdles in storing data and hiring people with the right expertise to manage it. Another concern: Foreign research vessels have already mapped some of Kiribati’s territorial waters and neglected to share data with the country’s government.

With just over six years to go until the deadline, Seabed 2030 faces serious challenges in completing the first public map of the seabed.

The impressive size of the ocean, the depths, the harsh working environment where ocean mappers constantly face wind, waves and the corrosive effects of salt water.

Then there is the cost of mapping remote international waters where no country has the responsibility to map.

Yet all of these challenges seem small compared to the work of uniting countries around a collective goal, especially nations as diverse as the US and the Republic of Kiribati.

The differences help explain why the goal of completing a complete map of the seafloor may remain out of reach for many decades.

*Laura Trethewey is the author of ‘The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans’

This text was originally published here.