Connection, community, and mapping the Pacific Ocean

If an ocean basin could win awards, perhaps the Pacific Ocean would win the most. It holds the titles of the largest, the deepest and the oldest of all the ocean basins. It is also home to a unique collection of countries and territories.

“We’ve got 45 countries or territories in the community, all the way from the world’s most populous nations to tiny little, oceanic states, these little islands that may have a small population of people and be small in size, but have massive marine estates,” says Kevin Mackay, head of the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project’s South and West Pacific Ocean Regional Center.

The South and West Pacific Ocean Regional Center is responsible for data compilation and coordination activities relating to the 123 million square kilometres of Pacific Ocean between South America and Australia, between 10°N and 50°S, and the western part of the Pacific Ocean to 50°N. “This includes everything from Asia, from Russia, down to China and Japan, Indonesia, all the way across the Pacific Ocean to South America, up to up to up to Panama,” says Mackay, noting that Hawaii, the Pacific side of the USA, and Canada fall under the remit of the Arctic and North Pacific Ocean Regional Center.

Particularly for those living on any of the myriad small islands, Mackay highlights that life is deeply intertwined with the ocean. “The Pacific is the one place on the planet where the ocean is fundamental to civilisation. If you look elsewhere in the world — North America, Europe, Africa, Asia — their histories and stories are concentrated on land. The oceans were merely a mechanism by which trade happened. In the Pacific, the oceans have been part of human life for thousands of years. It’s part of their legends and stories. Their knowledge and understanding of the ocean, it’s so unique.”

Finding innovative mapping solutions

When it comes to seabed mapping, one of the challenges facing the Pacific, in particular, is capacity. Many are “developing states. They don’t have the infrastructure – the education systems for people to gain the necessary skills, the computing power, the boats, or the instruments to collect data, to observe and monitor their own waters,” explains Mackay.

Several Pacific islanders have successfully gone through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Training Program. “There, they get hydrographic training and exposure to all the technologies. They become the experts in their countries, and then they can help lead into government policy,” says Mackay.

For the data collection itself, Mackay is looking to crowdsourcing. “We’re engaging recreational and commercial vessels which normally already have echo sounders and GPS systems onboard. We’re actively donating data loggers that they can plug into boats to collect data for themselves and us,” Mackay explains. These data loggers aren’t just crucial for collecting data for the GEBCO Grid, Mackay says. They’re essential for data sovereignty. “They effectively get a free source of marine data that they can use to inform their own decisions,” Mackay explains, noting that although foreign vessels survey waters under the jurisdiction of small island governments, the data isn’t always shared.

Mackay is always looking for new ways to bring in new seabed data. Sometimes those ideas come from unexpected conversations. While at the 2023 Marine Geological and Biological Habitat Mapping conference (GeoHab) held in Réunion, Mackay ended up in conversation with a biologist. “They’ve got CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) tags attached to seals. They know that seals bottom forage, so the deepest dive that the seals do is likely to be a proxy for the bottom depth,” explains Mackay. “Extracting bottom depth from seal data…it’s a non-traditional method. It’s an indirect measurement. It’s not as accurate as a multibeam echosounder, but it’s better than a guess, which is often what we’ve got right now.”

These types of conversations, the opportunity to meet with others working in different aspects of seabed mapping, or those working in fields related or adjacent to seabed mapping, is why Mackay finds these conferences so important. It’s also why the Mackay sees the South and West Pacific Ocean Regional Center’s annual meetings as key to the region’s seabed mapping community.

Fostering collaboration at the 2023 annual meeting

Every year the South and West Pacific Ocean Regional Centre holds an annual meeting “where we bring together our seabed mapping community - not just people who’ve mapped the seafloor, but people who use it for data,” says Mackay.

This year, the meeting will take place in July in Lima, Peru. “We rotate these annual meetings around the region, so everybody has an opportunity to come in person,” says Mackay. In 2024, Mackay intends to hold the meeting on one of the smaller Pacific islands, and in 2025, in Asia. Even so, Mackay is mindful that travel can be difficult, particularly for those on smaller islands where money is often tighter than for those in larger countries, which is why this year’s event will also be hybrid.

Hosted by the Peruvian Hydrographic Office (Dirección de Hidrografía y Navegación), the event will cover an array of topics, including identifying sources of bathymetric data, identifying regional priority areas, and an open data workshop. With the event taking place in Peru, Mackay is particularly keen to engage people in South America. “It’s important to engage local communities in language that they feel really comfortable with, so most of the conversations will be in Spanish,” explains Mackay, adding that English (and Spanish) translation services will also be provided.

For Mackay, building new and strengthening existing connections is one of the key benefits of the meeting. “As important as the presentations and other formal parts of the meeting are, it’s as much about creating that community where people can chat and share experiences and realise that, actually, their experience is not entirely unique, and there are people who can help them solve problems,” says Mackay. “Once you make those connections and have that community together, it just makes for a stronger, more interconnected world, and ultimately, that’s what Seabed 2030 is all about.”

This story was written for Seabed 2030