For our World Ocean Day June 2026 extra-length episode, Seabed 2030 Head of Partnerships Steve Hall interviews Dr Dawn Wright, Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, better known as ESRI, and a leading exponent of how we understand data and share our discoveries for the greater good.

Dawn is a member of the Strategic Advisory Group for Seabed 2030 and holds many other honours - see here for her 'about us' page on the Seabed 2030 site and click here for her detailed cv. Many other links out there for Dawn, search for 'Deep Sea Dawn' and you'll find many links! Here's one from her page at ESRI

Her dive with Victor Vescovo to the Challenger Deep marked a career highlight in a long story of achievement that started modestly as a sea-going technician on board the JOIDES Resolution as part of the Ocean Drilling Programme in the 1980s.

In the episode Dawn talks about her long career, which has encompassed being a sea-going technician, 17 years as a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University, authoring more than 180 articles and 12 books on marine geographical information systems and more. Her latest book "Mapping the Deep" is available through ESRI and your regular bookseller.

Dawn is a keen cyclist, a fan of Charles Schulz's 'Snoopy', and an inspirational role model.

Other links - YouTube 'Making the Limiting Factor' click here

Laura Trethewey's book The Deepest Map as mentioned by Dawn.

YouTube Lego Stop Motion Diving Challenger Deep click here

Link to the story about Dawn's 'Snoopy' being archived by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich here

Episode recorded and edited by Steve Hall, click here to email. Find out more about Seabed 2030 here. Music and extra narration by Emily Boddy.

Copyright Seabed 2030, 2026.

Revealing Hidden Depths - the Seabed 2030 Podcast
Find out more about our project at www.seabed2030.org
Brought to you by the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO

Chesapeake Technology is one of our newest MoU partners and in Episode 22 of the Seabed 2030 Podcast, Head of Partnerships Stephen Hall interviews company President Evan Reinsberg who you can contact directly via the link here

Chesapeake Technology is a leader in ocean geophysical and seafloor mapping software, serving defense, government, academic, and commercial marine survey customers worldwide.

Their flagship product, SonarWiz 8, is the industry-standard desktop platform for hydrographic data acquisition, processing, and mapping. SonarWiz unifies multi-sensor data — sidescan sonar, sub-bottom profiling, bathymetry, and magnetometers — into a single GIS environment, and has set the standard for quality, simplicity, and workflow efficiency across the marine survey industry.

SonarWiz Fathom extends the platform to the cloud, bringing the same trusted processing capabilities into a modern, collaborative environment. Fathom enables distributed teams to ingest, process, review, and deliver survey data from anywhere, with scalable cloud compute, role-based access, and streamlined deliverable generation — purpose-built for today's larger datasets, faster turnarounds, and distributed survey operations.

Chesapeake Technology's customers include the world's leading navies, academic and research institutions, commercial survey companies, government agencies, and defence contractors worldwide.

Private sector companies like Chesapeake Technology are key parts of our seabed mapping community, providing the software solutions essential for delivering the global map of the ocean, and we're delighted to welcome Evan and his colleagues as Seabed 2030 Partners.

We'll be back in June with a special World Ocean Day episode featuring Dr Dawn Wright.

Find out more about us at www.seabed2030.org, contact Steve via the link above with any questions, feedback, or to ask to be featured in a future episode.

With thanks to Emily Boddy for music and intro/outro narration.

Copyright 2026 Seabed 2030

#hydrospatial

Revealing Hidden Depths - the Seabed 2030 Podcast
Find out more about our project at www.seabed2030.org
Brought to you by the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO

For our first podcast of 2026 we feature an interview with David Bautista of Tcarta, based out of their St John's Newfoundland office where they work closley with the staff of Memorial University, another valued Seabed 2030 Partner.

Contact David at david@tcarta.com and see the Tcarta website here.

David is originally from Colombia, and finds the contrast ith Newfoundland quite noticeable! In the interview he taks about how satellite derived bathymetry (SBD) can play an important role in ocean mapping over shallow, clear, waters where the orbiting sensors can see the seabed well enough to make good estimates of bathymetry. It doesn't work much beyond a few tens of metres depth or in turbid waters, but can add valuable data to the global grid where the conditions are right.

Their homepage describes TCarta's service as "Remote Satellite-Based Hydrospatial Technologies, leveraging a long history of providing bathymetric data and seafloor mapping for marine applications, TCarta offers inland, coastal and offshore hydrospatial and geospatial mapping systems and solutions for geospatial remote sensing intelligence, coastal engineering, environmental and coastal monitoring, and global mapping applications.

Our dedicated team of GIS professionals, hydrographers, imagery analysts, and developers, along with our ecosystem of partner companies, work together to provide full-scope solutions to real world topics in a variety of applications – from engineering and exploration, to navigation and environmental monitoring, and Geospatial Intelligence. We have worked in the coastal waters throughout the globe and with large scale surveying initiatives in the Pacific, Caribbean and Indian Oceans and specific focus on remote island nations and challenging environments in the Middle East and Arctic regions."

Find out more about Seabed 2030 here, and contact podast producer Steve Hall as partnerships@seabed2030.org

Please note that in March we will be attending Economist World Ocean Summit in Montreal, and Oceanology International in London - with a special set of talks from our partners on 11th March. Hopefully see some of our listeners there!

Copyright Seabed 2030 2026, Music by Emily Boddy.

Revealing Hidden Depths - the Seabed 2030 Podcast
Find out more about our project at www.seabed2030.org
Brought to you by the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO