Fugro Maps Arctic Ocean for Norway’s MAREANO Seabed Mapping Programme
The Norwegian Hydrographic Service has awarded Fugro another hydrographic survey contract as part of the MAREANO seabed mapping programme, financed by Norway’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries, and the Ministry of Environment. Fugro has completed ten surveys for the programme since 2006 and acquired over 140,000 km2 of data. This latest survey will collect high-resolution, high-density multibeam echosounder and sub-bottom data to produce seamless datasets for the Norwegian mapping programme. The fieldwork will run from June to late October this year.
The survey area covers approximately 2,700km2 over Spitsbergenbanken, a large bank in the Barents Sea, in water depths ranging from 30m to 500m. Fugro will use state-of-the-art sensors, advanced calibration techniques and oceanographic measurement workflows designed for acquiring vital geodata in this challenging environment.
Crowdsourcing Initiatives
Dr Marco Filippone, chief hydrographer at Fugro, said: “Over the past 14 years, we have deployed our specialist multibeam echosounder equipment and applied our International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) certified hydrographers’ expertise on several surveys for the Norwegian Hydrographic Service under this programme.”
During the survey campaign, Fugro will continue its ongoing contributions to crowdsourcing initiatives such as the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project, the global initiative to produce a high-resolution map of the world’s ocean floor by the year 2030. To date, Fugro has donated 622,000km2 of bathymetric data to Seabed 2030, collected during transits to and from global survey areas, and aims to boost this contribution with transit data from the MAREANO programme.
Caption: Fugro has already completed 10 surveys and acquired over 140,000km2 of data for Norway’s MAREANO mapping programme since 2006.
