## 5 Conclusions  
For thousands of years, we have been probing the seas to measure its depths--originally with a stone or lead at the end of a line and now using modern multibeam echo-sounders capable of ensonifying wide swaths of the seafloor and producing hundreds of highly accurate depth measurements across this swath. Despite these thousands of years of effort, only a fraction of the world  
Figure 10: Autonomous multibeam sonar barge would be controlled and transmit data through telepresence and could become platform for many oceanographic and atmospheric measurements and maintain long-endurance at sea with relatively little cost. ocean's seafloor has been sampled for depth (far less than 15%), greatly limiting our ability to explore and understand critical ocean and seafloor processes. Remarkably, several planets in our solar system are mapped with far better coverage and at a higher resolution than our own planet. While it may be argued that mapping these distant planets is easier than mapping the seafloor because electromagnetic sensors can penetrate their atmospheres and thus high-resolution mapping is much simpler than trying to map the deep sea, the reality is that the overall cost of an extra-terrestrial mapping mission (a Mars mission typically costs on the order of $3B U.S.) is commensurate with the estimated cost of using existing sonar technology to completely map the 93% of the world's ocean deeper than 200 m. Unfortunately, we appear to be willing to spend these amounts to map other planets but not our own. Recognizing this poor state of our knowledge of ocean depths and the critical role such knowledge plays in understanding and maintaining our planet, GEBCO and the Nippon Foundation have joined forces to begin to address this issue. Through the establishment of the Nippon Foundation GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, an international effort has begun with the objective of facilitating the complete mapping of the world ocean by 2030. Achieving this goal will be far from simple. The Seabed 2030 Project will initially establish globally-distributed regional data assembly and coordination centers (RDACCs) that will focus on identifying existing data from their assigned regions that are not currently in publicly available databases and seek to make these data available. To do this, they will work with a Regional Mapping Committees made of regional experts from local hydrographic agencies and institutes as well as a network for alumni of the Nippon Foundation/GEBCO postgraduate training program, many of whom hold senior positions with hydrographic and other mapping agencies around the world. The four RDACCs--North Pacific and Arctic; South and West Pacific; Atlantic and Indian; and Southern centers--will also be developing common software and other tools to assemble and attribute appropriate metadata to the data sets they have acquired and then to assimilate these into regional grids using standardized techniques. Along with the data assembly and gridding tools, the RDACCs will be developing tools to continuously update data coverage and to identify and prioritize critical data gaps. The RDACCs will work with regional and global mapping agencies to facilitate and coordinate efforts aimed at collecting new data to fill these gaps. The regional grids will be transmitted to a Global Data Assembly and Coordination Center (GDACC) whose primary task will be to integrate the regional grids into a global grid and distribute this new grid to users worldwide. The GDACC will also act as the central focal point for the coordination of common data standards and processing tools as well as the outreach coordinator for Seabed 2030 efforts. Finally, the Nippon Foundation GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project will track and encourage the development of new and innovative technologies that can increase the efficiency of seafloor mapping and thus make the ambitious goals of Seabed 2030 more likely to be achieved. There can be no question that the goal of seeing the world ocean completely mapped by 2030 is a difficult one.