I have actually worked in bathymetric survey projects in 4 different continents, and I can tell you there is a good reason why the ocean floor hasnt been mapped yet.
For one its cost. A single survey ship (their rates are cheap now due to low oil prices), cost about USD30000 a day, A single ROV (>5k a day), ROV crew, divers, backup ROV(yes there needs to be 2 ROV's) why? one needs to recover the other in deepwater, ships crew, the survey crew etc... all usually comes to about 50k-70k a day in cost (and this is being really conservative). I am not including cost of bunkering (refueling the ship), crew transport to location, rotations, food, water, waste disposal etc and the list goes on. If you take USD100000 a day at an average of 60miles a day in length and probably a mile width, USD18.5 mil would probably not cover much of a distance. Dont forget the cost of processors to process the multibeam data (yes multibeam provides higher resolution because it collects more data points), the mappers-charters, engineers etc...etc. Just the cost alone is enough to put most people off. There is a reason why MH370 couldnt be found, and the cost was enormous that they had to call of the search.
It seems to me one could add sensors to existing cargo or other ships and have them collect data during their regular activities. You could pay them to deviate from their optimal course in a systematic way so as to cover more ocean with each voyage. No need to charter a ship or pay a crew to do this stuff.
This is similar to how OpenStreetMap uses GPS to gather mapping info from normal people making normal trips. Granted a lot of people go out of their way to gather extra data, but if everyone contributed a GPS track of every journey that would not be necessary.
Same thing, if every GA plane had a GPS and downward facing camera we could gather detailed imagery from much of the world.
TL;DR; Don't charter mapping expeditions, instead add automated mapping gear to vehicles that are already going places.
The only place that map showed with no traffic was sound of the horn of Africa, and the arctic. Between those latitudes there is traffic everywhere even if some is more sparse. You don't need to deviate far, increasing a long route by 5 percent can give a large lateral displacement. Remember, I said to pay them to do this too. Timely shipments are nice, but not always a priority.
In their roadmap [1], they talk about using their activities to drive additional funding:
Seabed 2030 will create a series of programmatic guidelines to be submitted
to national and international funding agencies, with the goal to promote
funding opportunities that will support and share the Seabed 2030 vision.
They also talk about crowd-sourcing the shallower areas, which presumably will only have a cost in data-processing.
There's an information note [2] which describes in brief how the $18.5M will be spent:
The funding will cover funding of the Director and some personnel at the five
centers, with some travel and meeting costs. It would not cover any actual
survey costs.
You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there and have it surface and beam back images by satellite. Sphere designs. Haha just a ball that sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
What about sea floor changes how long would these maps be valid for? Anyway that's crazy.
Won't be deploying my gold-finding crabs anytime soon.
Specialized vessels (e.g. heavy crane ships, pipelay) can cost 250k-500k per day. A smaller survey vessel will obviously be much cheaper, but there's crew to pay, operating costs, specialized labor costs (ROV engineers, scientists), logistics, fuel, etc. It all adds up.
>You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that aren't tethered to a ship are in wide use. However, you still need a ship to deploy, maintain, etc.
How much work do they get? Because in theory, at that rate they could get 3.65 million dollars a year if they didn't take breaks (and maybe "only" 2 million dollars a year if they did).
Don't forget the leverage they get from charging out juniors at high rates as well. Magic circle law firms could easily charge 500 pounds per hour for an associate and a significant part of that will go into the partners' kitty
Why use ROVs for mapping? AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) are so much better suited for pure-mapping tasks when compared to ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles). There is no need to have a full pilot/team operate a ROV 24/7 for tasks when most underwater mapping can be done with autonomous vehicles. The cost of developing and operating an AUV is near half of what it costs to operate a ROV, since you don't need nearly as complex of vehicles or as many staff on the ship - write the software once for an AUV and the important things can be replicated. I agree that the search space is huge, but human operated vehicles (especially humans driving via expensive ships) are absolutely not the answer. The cost of processing the multibeam data is negligible when compared to running vehicles in the deep ocean. (source: engineer for underwater vehicles)
More than this, because there are lost days when you work offshore. You'll travel from the coast to your point of interest. You do not chart at night if you can avoid it. There is not point in using your instruments in previously well known areas so you are not charting all the seawork hours. Some days the weather will not allow you to deploy the instruments safely, and things can break also ruining the entire campaign.
I had my part of this also (in a local scale) and is not an easy task. When the climate is suboptimal you need to fight against your desire to throw up constantly; at the same time that manipulating very fragile and expensive material in an always moving and often slippery platform.
It sounds like a lot but really isn't when you look at where else the money is going, even just within the research community. For example, that is about one year's worth of pointless medical research (the final reports are of no use to anyone due to bad design, terse descriptions, etc):
Then you need to maintain it all the year and hire the crew, and rent an area to 'park' your ship. Cheaper or not depends on your load, location and expected duration of campaigns.
The Spanish Oceanographic Institute own five ships and a ROV for example, with labs and all the stuff http://www.ieo.es/flota
For long expeditions (antartida) larger ships are shared directly with the army.
Yes, but in many places you can only do work in some months each year (because weather) and can only map the bottom if the ship is not reserved for studying other things (fisheries, ecosystems, geology, red tides, black tides, phyto blooms...). And people have children and family and teach duties. Your campaign just can't last for 12 months.
Having a ship in a port for eight months is also expensive and moving a big ship eats a lot of gaz, so for coastal areas... "We're gonna need a smaller boat".
For one its cost. A single survey ship (their rates are cheap now due to low oil prices), cost about USD30000 a day, A single ROV (>5k a day), ROV crew, divers, backup ROV(yes there needs to be 2 ROV's) why? one needs to recover the other in deepwater, ships crew, the survey crew etc... all usually comes to about 50k-70k a day in cost (and this is being really conservative). I am not including cost of bunkering (refueling the ship), crew transport to location, rotations, food, water, waste disposal etc and the list goes on. If you take USD100000 a day at an average of 60miles a day in length and probably a mile width, USD18.5 mil would probably not cover much of a distance. Dont forget the cost of processors to process the multibeam data (yes multibeam provides higher resolution because it collects more data points), the mappers-charters, engineers etc...etc. Just the cost alone is enough to put most people off. There is a reason why MH370 couldnt be found, and the cost was enormous that they had to call of the search.