Norway is all up in this, as the kids used to say:
August 2018
"Norway to Map Deep Sea Mineral Deposits"
September 2019
Norway's Petroleum Directorate Completes Second Seabed MINERALS Expedition
August 2020
"The rush to claim an undersea mountain range"
As is the World Economic Forum, host to this piece from The Conversation, July 20:
- A single survey ship would take about 350 years to adequately map most of the seabed deeper than 200 metres.
- However, Ocean mapping is now central to two major international initiatives.
- The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project aims to see all of the ocean floor mapped by 2030 through voluntary data contributions.
Marine scientists often feel like they’re fumbling in the dark. The global ocean covers about 71 per cent of our planet and is central to life as it exists on Earth. But only about 20 per cent of the seafloor has been directly mapped so far.
Survey ships equipped with sonars called multibeam echo sounders are being used to measure the depth of the seafloor to better understand it. But the size of the job is enormous. A single survey ship would take about 350 years to adequately map most of the seabed deeper than 200 metres, and it would take another 620 years to map the shallower areas.
We must map the ocean faster. Today, marine surveying, or hydrography, is central to major international initiatives, including one that aims to see all of the ocean floor mapped in unprecedented detail by 2030.
A more detailed and accurate global model of water depth would reveal the seafloor’s shape, and the data can be used to understand seabed composition. This will increase the safety of marine navigation, inform security and defence operations, improve oceanographic and climate studies, support various sectors of the sustainable ocean economy and guide decisions on habitat conservation. But it could also come with risks and costs.
Unknown sea
In 2007, as an undergraduate co-op student working at the Geological Survey of Canada’s Pacific Geoscience Centre near Victoria, B.C., I helped map seabed habitats and hazards off the West Coast....
....MUCH MORE
