Here Come the Cartographers: Mapping the Seabed in the Digital Age

Abstract

Members of the international oceans science and governance community are working to accelerate the effort to finish a complete mapping of the seabed by 2030. Based on our observations at the One Ocean Science Congress and the Third United Nations Oceans Congress, in this piece, we review the knowledge, technological, and regulatory-based arguments made in support of this effort and contextualize these within the broader history of mapping that highlights the relationship between science-driven legibility of space and political-economic change. Overall, we find that proponents of mapping generally present the act as a depoliticized, technical exercise that offers a general “good” to society. We point to the ways that this approach obscures the politics of mapping and urge attention to the more-than-technical nature of mapping. The processes and outcomes of mapping cannot be assumed, and proponents of seabed mapping should account for the scrambled relations and contestations that mapping drives and reflects.