Engineers have been discreetly assembling something that most marine biology and oceanography scientists were unaware existed until recently in an operations center at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, a building that sits between the harbor and a highway and doesn’t advertise what happens inside. Not a weapon. It’s not a monitoring system in the way that immediately springs to mind. a collection of data.
Seafloor measurements, sonar readings, and satellite radar passes are combined to create the most comprehensive image of the ocean floor ever made public. This image reveals mountain ranges, trenches, and geological features that were previously only found in classified files and were never accessible to those who work as ocean researchers.
The Navy’s program follows a dual-use logic that is becoming more and more prevalent in American defense science: the same data that helps with undersea infrastructure protection, sonar performance modeling, and submarine navigation also proves to be incredibly useful for earthquake hazard assessment, cable routing, climate research, and the identification of marine species.
High-resolution bathymetric maps, which are intricate three-dimensional representations of the seafloor created using satellite radar altimetry and acoustic sonar soundings, are being released by the Office of Naval Research in cooperation with NOAA. These maps cover previously uncharted oceanic territory. Prior to the start of these operations, less than 25% of the world’s ocean floor had been meaningfully documented. Until recently, we knew more about the surface of Mars than the majority of Earth’s deep ocean.
Researchers who thought the general contours of ocean floor geography were well-established were genuinely surprised by the topographic findings. In places where earlier surveys revealed just a featureless abyssal plain, seamounts—underwater mountains, some of which rise several kilometers above the seafloor—have been discovered. The accuracy with which deep-sea trenches have been traced allows geologists to model plate boundary behavior differently by revealing internal structure.
In addition to being geologically fascinating, the features being recorded also serve as habitat, and the biodiversity studies carried out in tandem with the mapping activities have discovered populations of creatures that have adapted to conditions that were previously unknown to science. In regions accessible through these exploration collaborations, hundreds of hitherto unidentified marine species have been identified, concentrated in the kind of geological complexity that the new maps reveal for the first time.
The Next-Generation Ocean Data Initiative (NGODI) of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific approaches the monitoring issue in a different way. NGODI uses fleets of sensor nodes to continually gather temperature, salinity, pressure, acoustic, and chemical data from places that were previously only observed through sporadic research cruises, as opposed to charting what is already there.
In order to create a durable observational network across maritime regions that are important for both military operations and civilian climate research, the nodes are made to be economical enough to install at scale. The data streams feed into models that track the flow of heat through the ocean system, enhance weather forecasting, and support fish stock management—processes that the Navy is concerned about for operational reasons but that science has been attempting to independently characterize for decades using far fewer instruments.
It’s difficult to overlook the unique aspect of this moment in ocean science, where data that was constantly being gathered, processed, and utilized for defense applications is now being made available to the research community and generating discoveries at a rate that the academic sector alone could not have organized or funded.
Newly disclosed naval data is a key component of the Seabed 2030 project, a multinational effort to map the entire ocean floor to high resolution by the end of the decade. Previously, this was a difficult gap-filling challenge. It seems almost ironic that an organization that had every reason to keep its knowledge of the world’s least understood ecosystem secret for decades is suddenly contributing to its illumination. We are mapping the ocean. The mapping team is often taken aback by the outcomes.
