Irish Seabed Survey
Ireland is an island nation with a sea territory that is ten times that of our land area. So it was only fitting that in 1999 the ambitious Irish National Seabed Survey (INSS) was launched. It was a marine survey simply massive in scope, indeed it remains today amongst the largest marine mapping programmes ever undertaken anywhere in the world.
During its six-year time frame Ireland has developed a world-leading reputation for seabed mapping including methodologies, human capacity, know-how and physical infrastructure. Under its implementation the majority of the Irish continental marine area has been mapped for an investment of €32 million, producing over 300 paper-based charts and a total of 5.5 Terabyte of digital information stored on the INSS database in GSI.
The main concentration of INSS was deep water mapping, now there is a successor programme to INSS - INFOMAR which concentrates on inshore mapping. Please click here for more details.