The new director of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, Jamie McMichael-Phillips, has now taken up his position as leading one of the most challenging projects of the next decade: the mapping of the entire ocean floor by the year 2030.

The announcement of his appointment was made at a conference held at the Royal Society in London, entitled “From Vision to Action.” The meeting, which brought together some of the world’s leading scientists and maritime organizations, was convened to mark the progress made in the two years since Seabed 2030 was launched and to look ahead to the remaining challenges in mapping the gaps in understanding the seafloor.

Seabed 2030 is an international initiative, supported by over 100 maritime organizations. The project has four Regional Centers, based in strategically located areas of the world, which feed data into a Global Center hosted at the British Oceanographic Data Centre in Southampton, U.K.

Since the publication of the 2014 GEBCO map, Seabed 2030 has seen a doubling of the bathymetric data available to produce the definitive map of the world’s oceans. The total contributions to the map are equivalent to the landmass of the entire African continent. GEBCO is the only organization with a mandate to map the entire ocean floor.

For more information on The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, visit seabed2030.gebco.net, or contact Jamie McMichael-Phillips at director@seabed2030.org.