Martin Jakobsson is responsible for the Arctic Ocean in a project with the long name Nippon Foundation Gebco Seabed 2030. It is an effort to compile depth data mainly from echosounders into a global map of the ocean floors.
Having control over the ocean depths is important not just for the currently highly topical energy and communication cables, but also for predicting how tsunamis arise and move and how coastlines are affected by climate change.
Despite humans having sailed the oceans for thousands of years, we still have a very poor image of what is down there. It was only with the breakthrough of sonar technology from the First World War and onwards that vessels got a smooth way to read the underwater terrain.
A massive fjord
But Martin Jakobsson tells that the blind spots are still many and large. Really large.
North of Greenland and the Canadian archipelago, for example, there are areas that are roughly mapped with a few points here and there. It is incredibly poor in some places, telling from the phone from Svalbard.
We were, for example, the first vessel to enter Lincoln Sea and reach a fjord called Victoria Fjord last summer – it has thus never been any vessel there at all. And the fjord is enormous.
This can be seen as an illustration that a tremendous amount of work remains. How much nobody knows. Large amounts of vessels are running with echosounders that read the environment down there, so a large part of Seabed 2030's work consists of getting operators, owners, and states around the world to share their data.
They contribute with data, we take care of it, says Jakobsson.
Then we have developed a "gridding". We call it gridding when you put together and make the model itself. We have developed a method that runs on supercomputers, goes through all these depth data points and creates a model of the ocean floor.
Abstains from resolution
Despite the project being far from complete, the demand is already high. An example Jakobsson mentions is the communication and energy cables that are now being laid across the oceans and have become highly topical due to the question of suspected sabotage, among other things in the Baltic Sea.
When we are going to look at the spread of projected new underwater cables, then it is our data that is used in the base in this first stage.
Seabed 2030, however, deliberately abstains from higher resolution in the data.
It also has to do with many nations seeing this as militarily strategic data, so we have, like, stopped where it starts getting so detailed, says Jakobsson.
We do not go into higher detail than a depth value every hundred meters.
Would have made a difference
What this means can be illustrated by the search for MH370, the passenger plane that disappeared over Asia with 239 people on board and is believed to have crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. With Seabed 2030's resolution, the plane would not be visible on the ocean floor – but Jakobsson emphasizes that it would still have made a huge difference if these areas had been mapped then.
There, it was very poorly mapped. There were very few points, tens of miles apart, and so on. And then you cannot plan detailed investigations with underwater vehicles. You cannot, like, see in the terrain what it looks like.
This means that there can be entire mountains, fully comparable to Sweden's largest, down there that nobody knows about. Which plays a role in many contexts.
When it comes to other things, such as how a tsunami propagates over the ocean floor, then you need this intermediate resolution so you can see that here comes topography that steers the tsunami this or that way. We provide data to that level.
Falling behind
The result can be seen if you zoom out in the oceans on electronic maps that most of us use.
Yes, absolutely, all those you see are basically our product, says Jakobsson – who, however, jokingly complains that the IT guys are not quite keeping up.
Google Maps is actually falling behind a bit.
I have seen that they have not updated the latest up in the Arctic. I will send an email to them that they must be faster with the updates – they have full access to our "grid" that they use, he laughs.
Although we usually talk about the world's oceans, there is actually only one – a global mass of saltwater that sits together and covers over two-thirds of our planet.
This global ocean can, in some corners, be relatively shallow, such as in our own inland sea, the Baltic Sea. But generally, it is very deep – on average over 3,500 meters. This means that it contains an enormous amount of water: over 97 percent of the world's water.
The largest part is the Pacific Ocean, which alone is larger than the entire land area of the Earth. There are also the deepest depths, in the Mariana Trench between Papua New Guinea and Japan. This curved underwater ravine, over 2,500 kilometers long, contains many places that are deeper than Mount Everest is.
Sonar (from the English abbreviation "sonic navigation and ranging") is a technique for sending out sound and, with the help of echoes, charting the surroundings.
The first users can be said to be certain animal species, for example, dolphins and bats, which have navigated via echoes in millions of years. For humans, Leonardo da Vinci was early on with the technique, in the late 1400s. In modern form, sonar equipment was developed to handle the threat from submarines in the First World War.
