Ocean floor mappers wanted

At the first UN ocean conference only five years ago, an ambitious target was proposed to map the entire seabed by 2030 today. Just shy of 25% has been accumulated and uploaded for all to see last year alone, some 10 million square kilometres added. That's the equivalent to the land surface of Europe. Here to tell us more about the project is Jamie McMichael Phillips from Seabed 2030, a collaborative project providing the inspiration and thrust needed to get this target over the finishing line. Jamie, welcome to the show. The first question out of the blocks: why have we set such a difficult challenge?

Jamie - Well, we cannot manage what we haven't mapped. We have an earth surface of about 510 million square kilometres. 70% of that is covered in ocean. To date, we know more about the surface of the moon, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do our own planet. So we need to get out and map our ocean floor because of a whole host of other signs and activities that are hugely dependent on having an accurate map of the ocean. So, for example, to be able to manage our fisheries, to be able to manage ecosystems, and to protect ecosystems, we need an adequate map. The ocean is full of bodies of water of different densities and different temperatures, and they mix throughout the ocean, are driven by the ocean currents. And those ocean currents are influenced by the shape and the roughness, the ruggedness of the sea floor. And those ocean currents have a direct effect on climate change, they interact in our polar ice caps, they interact as part of ice melting. They have an effect on the climate, they have effect on sea level rise, and it's hugely important we get out there and we map our ocean floor. 25% to date - we need to get to a hundred by the year 2030.

Harry - That's really interesting. I didn't realise quite how obvious the relationship is between the sea floor and ocean currents as well which, in the future, with climate change on the rise, is is going to be of paramount importance, being able to predict that movement. When it comes to looking at mapping the sea floor, my initial thought was kind of just slap a lot of scientific instruments on merchant vessels. But on second, <laugh> on a second count of it. Those paths that they take, they're quite strict, they have to stick to certain routes. So maybe it's not the best thing to do. Where are you getting this data from? Or where do you go to get the rest of this information?

Jamie - Well, the biggest challenge is that we are stuck with using sound in water to measure water depth. We've heard before about the Hubble telescope, the James Webb space telescope, everything that operates in the visual spectrum doesn't apply. The ocean's light only penetrates no more than about 10 metres of water. So we've got to use sound and we do that using a sonar system: a ping from the hull of a ship. We measure the two-way depth, and you can measure the two-way return, and you can calculate the depth. And it's a long, slow process because we do have 362 million square kilometres of ocean. So getting out there, and gathering that information is a slow process. We're hugely reliant on data donations from government ships, from philanthropists, from industry, and from academia. But also, very crucially, and this goes back to the very heart of our inspiration, every vessel operator has a potential to become a scientist, a citizen scientist, by logging the depth information from their safety of navigation echo sounders, logging the position from their GPS systems and sending it into us. And every piece of depth information adds to that map.

Harry - There have got to be some points where vessels just don't normally go. So you're really having to call upon these people, aren't you?

Jamie - Absolutely. There are vast swathes of ocean now - you've said earlier 25% mapped, 75% still to go - and there are parts of the ocean that are off the beaten track, people simply don't go there and we need to mobilise our global community to think about those areas because the ocean is joined up. It is one ocean. Every water mass is joined to every other water mass. Therefore, we cannot afford to miss any part of that ocean space out. We've got to get out there, we've got to map it. And this was, I think, something that we had been doing since 1903. It was an initiative that was started by Prince Albert I of Monaco, and he brought together scientists, engineers, oceanographers to try and mobilise that global community, to start mapping the ocean and seabed 2030. Established in 2017, we're now in year five, it has been the accelerator to get from where we were in 2017, which was at 6%, now to just under 25% of the world's ocean floor mapped. But we've still got a long way to go. We are on target, but we've got to focus the global effort to get there by 2030.

Harry - So far from the data that you have collected, has anything stood out as unusual or have there been any particular highlights?

Jamie - Absolutely. If we go back to October 2020, one of our research partners, Schmidt Ocean Institute, had a team of scientists onboard their research vessel Falkor. That team was led by the James Cook University in Australia, and they discovered a 500 metre high detached coral reef in the Great Barrier Reef area: the first time that such a feature had been discovered in over 120 years. That was five times taller than Big Ben, taller than the Empire State Building, and nobody had discovered it until October 2020. More recently, in January this year, a huge pristine coral reef was discovered off the coast of Tahiti. All those discoveries need to be based on looking at what's on the map, looking what stands out as unusual. And of course, if we haven't mapped it, we cannot detect those features.

Harry - And if you can't detect them, I guess you can't protect them. Jamie, thanks ever so much. If you are listening in and you are a certified captain of the open seas and think you can lend a hand, a reminder that that was Jamie McMichael-Phillips from Seabed 2030. By the sound of it, he'd sure love to hear from you.