SO-ABBA: A Southern Ocean Animal-Borne Bathymetry Analysis

The Southern Ocean and its continental shelves play critical roles in regulating Earth’s climate through their influence on heat and energy transport. Accurate representation of these processes is hindered by large uncertainties in regional bathymetry. We present a comprehensive, animal-borne bathymetric dataset derived from 1,394 southern elephant, Weddell and crabeater seals equipped with satellite relay data loggers across the Southern Ocean. The data set contains 4,492,019 individually georeferenced dives, with a mean location uncertainty of 1.7 km. Approximately 8.4 % of dives recorded depths at least 20 m deeper than the corresponding values in IBCSO V2 (1.3% were 200 m deeper). These discrepancies were most common on the Antarctic continental shelf and mid-ocean plateaus. The seal-derived depth values reveal numerous areas of uncharted deep water, ocean channels and troughs. These new bathymetry observations will improve oceanographic models and global climate forecasts. The new dataset is complementary to the global SEABED 2030 initiative to map the ocean floor by 2030.

This data set comprises the dive data file in parquet and (zipped) CSV formats, and a Matlab script to assist with reading the CSV file. Detailed metadata is provided in the associated data paper: Hindell et al. (submitted) SO-ABBA: A Southern Ocean Animal-Borne Bathymetry Analysis. Nature Scientific Data.

We also provide a link to an R-Shiny app that allows interactive exploration of the dive data (see the "Related works" section).