Inaugural Ocean Mapping Meeting Held in New Zealand
A gathering
of ocean mapping experts and
maritime officials in Wellington, NZ,
was the inaugural mapping meeting of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project’s South and West
Pacific regional data center. Among
the outcomes of the meeting was a commitment to identify
unmapped areas within the center’s remit – around 124 million square kilometers
of ocean – with the ultimate aim of seeing these areas
included in a complete and definitive map of the world’s ocean
floor by the year 2030.
Seabed 2030 divides responsibility
for coordinating data identification, collection and inclusion in regional datasets between four regional
centers, each covering different areas of the ocean.
These centers are located at the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Germany,
covering the Southern Ocean; the National Institute of
Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in Wellington, New
Zealand, covering the South and West
Pacific Ocean; the Lamont Doherty
Earth Observatory at Columbia University, U.S., covering the Atlantic and
Indian Oceans; and at Stockholm University in Sweden, in partnership with the
University of New Hampshire, U.S., for the Arctic and North Pacific
Ocean. Regional products are fed in
to the Global Data and Coordination Centre hosted at the British Oceanographic
Data Centre in Southampton, U.K. With the successful conclusion of the meeting in Wellington, all four of the regional centers have now held their first meetings under the Seabed 2030 project.
The workshop, held Mar. 4-6 at the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club, was convened and chaired by Dr Geoffroy Lamarche, who leads the South and West Pacific regional data and coordination center based at New Zealand’s NIWA. The center is responsible for an ocean area from the west coast of South America to the east coast of Australia, and north to Japan, Korea, and China. Forty-three people from 13 countries attended the workshop, including five alumni of The Nippon Foundation/GEBCO Postgraduate Training Programme, while two connected to proceedings remotely from New Caledonia.
Learn more about The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project: https://seabed2030.gebco.net/