## 1 Introduction
Despite the appearance of full global coverage of ocean depths, even the most recent GEBCO or other global compilations of ocean bathymetry (e.g., NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI, which serves as the IHO Data Center for Digital Bathymetry), or the Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT)) are deceptive, the product of the power of modern interpolation and visualization techniques that produce what appears to be a complete compilation of ocean depth from fundamentally sparse data. Upon close inspection, when divided into its resolution of 30 arc-second grid cells (926 m at the equator), approximately 82 percent of the grid cells in the GEBCO_2014 grid have no depth measurements in them [1] (Figure 1). While the details of current global bathymetric coverage will be discussed below, there is no question that even from even this cursory view, most of the earth's surface that lies beneath the seas is vastly under-sampled, limiting ourability to perform the detailed quantitative analyses of the seafloor morphology, i.e., geomorphometry, needed to understand ocean and seafloor processes. Recognizing the poor state of our knowledge of ocean depths and the critical role that such knowledge plays in understanding and maintaining our planet, the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO launched the Seabed 2030 Project at the \"Forum for the Future of Ocean Floor Mapping\" in Monaco in June of 2016. With planned funding from the Nippon Foundation of approximately $18.5M US over ten years, The Nippon Foundation--GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project aims at establishing an infrastructure to facilitate the complete mapping of the world ocean floor by 2030, with the view of empowering the world to make policy decisions, use the ocean sustainably, and undertake scientific research based on detailed bathymetric information of the Earth's seabed. To implement this ambitious goal, the Seabed 2030 Project Team was established and met for the first time in late October 2017 in Southampton U.K. In creating this strategy, Seabed 2030 builds on one hundred years of GEBCO's legacy of ocean mapping as well as established regional connections in all corners of the world and a global community of alumni built over 12 years through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO training program in ocean bathymetry at the University of New Hampshire ([[http://www.gebco.net/training/training_programme/](http://www.gebco.net/training/training_programme/)]([http://www.gebco.net/training/training_programme/](http://www.gebco.net/training/training_programme/))). This paper, based upon \"The Nippon-Foundation GEBCO--Seabed 2030 Roadmap for Future Ocean Floor Mapping\" (2017) (which served as the proposal for the project to the Nippon Foundation),  
Figure 1: A shaded relief of the GEBCO_2014 grid modified from [1]. The oceans have been divided into four geographic regions each managed by a Seabed 2030 Regional Data Assembly and Coordination Center: AWI—Alfred Wegner Institute, Germany—responsible for Southern Ocean; LDEO—Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, USA—responsible for Atlantic and Indian Oceans; NIWA—National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand—responsible for South Pacific Ocean; Stockholm University, Sweden and the University of New Hampshire, USA—responsible for Arctic and North Pacific Oceans. BODC—British Oceanographic Data Center will serve as the Global Data Assembly and Coordination Center and be responsible for distributing the final Seabed 2030 products. presents the rationale behind the Seabed 2030 Project, describes its structure, outlines its initial implementation strategy, and discusses the benefit of developing such a product. Of particular relevance with respect to geomorphometry, we present these issues in the context of geomorphometric analyses and address the critical question \"at what resolution should Seabed 2030 aim to map the world's ocean's floors?\"