From the shallows to the deep. Mapping Portugal’s seabed
Portugal's SEAMAP 2030 programme is on an unprecedented mission to meticulously chart the country's maritime depths, contributing a vital piece of the global puzzle to the monumental GEBCO bathymetric grid. Guided by the Hydrographic Institute of Portugal (IHPT), this ambitious undertaking seeks to uncover the secrets of Portugal's oceanic realm by 2030 by mapping the seabed with advanced technology.
If there were a metaphor for building the GEBCO bathymetric grid, surely a jigsaw puzzle would be most appropriate. “You have these little individual pieces that you put together to build the puzzle,” says Dr Vicki Ferrini, senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and head of The Nippon Foundation–GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project’s Atlantic and Indian Oceans Regional Center.
There is, however, a big difference. When you buy a jigsaw puzzle, you have all of the pieces at hand. For the GEBCO grid, not all the pieces have been created yet. Fortunately, efforts are underway to build those pieces. When nations commit to mapping the seabed in their waters, they aren’t just creating individual pieces but larger, preassembled sections. “It accelerates what we’re trying to do at the global scale,” says Ferrini. Portugal is among the countries engaged in crafting a preassembled section.
Putting Portugal on the (seabed) map with the SEAMAP 2030 programme
Led by Portugal’s Hydrographic Institute of Portugal (IHPT), the SEAMAP 2030 programme has set out to map all the seabed within Portugal’s maritime space by 2030, using multibeam echosounders.
“In the beginning, we started collecting data for the proposal for the extension of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles,” says Rear-Admiral João Paulo Ramalho Marreiros, director general of the IHPT. If granted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the extension of the continental shelf would see Portugal gain sovereign rights over the proposed area, which is the size of Europe, for exploitation of the seabed.
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SEAMAP 2030: unveiling Portugal's seabed secrets was written for (and can be read in full at) Hydro International.
