Seabed Mapping: A Brief History from Meaningful Words

Abstract

Over the last few centuries, mapping the ocean seabed has been a major challenge for marine geoscientists. Knowledge of seabed bathymetry and morphology has significantly impacted our understanding of our planet dynamics. The history and scientific trends of seabed mapping can be assessed by data mining prior studies. Here, we have mined the scientific literature using the keyword “seabed mapping” to investigate and provide the evolution of mapping methods and emphasize the main trends and challenges over the last 90 years. An increase in related scientific production was observed in the beginning of the 1970s, together with an increased interest in new mapping technologies. The last two decades have revealed major shift in ocean mapping. Besides the range of applications for seabed mapping, terms like habitat mapping and concepts of seabed classification and backscatter began to appear. This follows the trend of investments in research, science, and technology but is mainly related to national and international demands regarding defining that country’s exclusive economic zone, the interest in marine mineral and renewable energy resources, the need for spatial planning, and the scientific challenge of understanding climate variability. The future of seabed mapping brings high expectations, considering that this is one of the main research and development themes for the United Nations Decade of the Oceans. We may expect a new higher resolution ocean seafloor map that might be as influential as The Floor of the Oceans map.

Review of Underwater Sensing Technologies and Applications

“…The Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) plan to cooperate globally to map the whole seafloor topography by the end of 2030 [ 8 ]. The detailed charted topography of the whole ocean will have a great help on understanding of marine geology, utilizing the marine mineral and renewable energy resources, monitoring the marine geohazards and providing route surveys for underwater cables and pipelines [ 9 , 10 ]. Because of the efficiency and convenience, remote sensing devices have also become a popular research topic in recent years, such as satellite altimetry, bathymetric LiDAR, and satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) [ 10 ].…”

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and Field of View in Underwater Operations

“…The operator can control these values in real time or predefine certain actions. In the present study, the irregularity of the seafloor has not been considered, comprising part of the future work [43][44][45]. Figure 5 shows the main variables considered in the definition of the FOV.…”

Cold-Water Coral Habitat Mapping: Trends and Developments in Acquisition and Processing Methods

“…Figure 1 summarizes the most frequent words within these publications. The lexical analysis was based on the algorithm that calculates all occurrence of relevant words in the reference articles [86]. Table 1.…”