The $3 bn map: Scientists pool oceans of data to plot Earth's final frontier
Map of the entire ocean floor
"We obviously need a lot of cooperation from different parties - individuals as well as private companies," said Mao Hasebe, project coordinator at the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic organisation supporting the initiative.
"We think it's ambitious, but we don't think it's impossible," Hasebe said.
Reuters
A step towards advancement
The end result would be greater knowledge of the oceans' biodiversity, improved understanding of the climate, advanced warning of impending disasters, and the ability to better protect or exploit deep-sea resources, said Hasebe.
Reuters
The huge mapping effort
"We depend on having that knowledge of what's around us - and the same is true for the ocean," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
With their deep craters and mountain ranges, the contours of the earth beneath the waves are both vast and largely unknown.
But a huge mapping effort is underway to change that.
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'Seabed 2030'
But mapping the oceans goes back much further, said Mayer - to 1903, when Prince Albert I of Monaco was the first to do it comprehensively. The rudimentary method involved tossing overboard a "hunk of lead at the end of a rope" to plumb the depths.
Technology evolved after the second world war to using echosound reflections, but that produced only a "blurry picture", said Mayer.
Today, high-tech multibeam echosounders transmit a fan of acoustic beams from a ship, which ping back depending on the depth and topography of the ocean floor. That creates data points, which can be converted into a map.
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A century of advances
"We can survey much more efficiently - and, not only that, but in much greater detail," he said, adding that the work was painstaking.
"The ocean's a big place!" he said.
The advent of new technology such as underwater drones and robots is also speeding up the mapping process.
A global competition hosted by energy giant Shell - the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE - is also underway, offering $7 million to teams that can develop technologies to conduct ocean exploration autonomously, rapidly and to a high resolution.
A team from Seabed 2030 has reached the final stages of the competition with an idea based on remotely operated robots working in extreme depths to map territory independently.
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Changing tide
They said it would also help the so-called "blue economy" as countries and companies seek to protect or exploit deep-sea resources - from exploring for oil and gas to installing wind farms or laying fibre-optic cables for the internet.
That is predicted to become more important in the coming years, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It expects the ocean economy to contribute $3 trillion to the world economy by 2030, up from $1.5 trillion in 2010.
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