Towards an International Seamount Science Program (SEAMOUNTS)
Concept Note v3 15 June 2026

Rationale: Seamounts occur across 21% of the global seafloor, an area larger than many terrestrial biomes, yet they remain among the least explored environments on Earth. This is not an isolated gap. It reflects the broader state of deep-ocean science, which remains chronically underfunded and largely out of sight, despite its fundamental importance to climate regulation, food security, and biodiversity. As such, deep-ocean research remains largely opportunistic and discovery-driven. Seamounts play a critical role in Earth system science through their influence on ocean circulation and biogeochemical cycles. They provide extensive hard substrates where biological communities can be highly diverse and, at times, endemic. As such, seamounts function as ecological hotspots that enhance productivity and enable connectivity across the open ocean.

From a geological perspective, seamounts are commonly defined as seabed features rising more than 1,000 m above the surrounding seafloor. Current estimates suggest the existence of ~40,000 such large seamounts (>1,000 m). Ecologically, however, seamount-like habitats also occur on smaller elevations (100–1,000 m), including hills and knolls that share many functional characteristics with larger seamounts. Hereafter, the term “seamounts” is used inclusively to encompass all seabed features rising more than 100 m above the ocean floor with summits below sea level.

No two seamounts are alike. They differ in origin, age, morphology, hydrography, and biological composition. Some act as biodiversity hotspots and essential breeding, nursery, foraging, or migratory habitats for fishes, skates, sharks and octopuses and other invertebrates. For many coastal and low-income communities, fisheries represent an irreplaceable source of dietary protein and food security, and the productivity systems that underpin commercial fish stocks depend in part on deep-sea processes.

Many seamounts likely harbor undiscovered genetic, biochemical, and microbial resources, with the potential to inspire transformative applications in biotechnology, medicine, and industry. Discoveries from deep extreme habitats have already advanced knowledge of bioactive compounds and inspired novel pharmaceuticals and industrial processes.

Seamounts play a role in global ocean processes, influencing circulation, mixing, nutrient supply, carbon sequestration, and benthic–pelagic coupling. They provide vertical and horizontal connectivity in the ocean, acting as steppingstones for dispersal, driving evolutionary processes, and linking the deep sea with the upper ocean. These processes remain poorly quantified, despite their significance, limiting our ability to represent seamounts in Earth system models and forecasts. At the same time, seamounts already underpin emerging and established blue economy activities, including fisheries, marine genetic resources, subsea infrastructure, and ocean-based innovation, yet the scientific basis needed to assess benefits, risks, and trade-offs remains incomplete.

Scientific understanding of seamounts lags far behind their global importance. Current knowledge gaps on seamounts constrains discovery science and limits our capacity to quantify ecosystem services, evaluate socioeconomic benefits, anticipate cumulative impacts, and support evidence-based governance. Establishing baselines is therefore not merely academic but a prerequisite for policies that can balance human needs with the long-term integrity of marine ecosystems. Although seamount roles in maintaining ocean health is recognized in global frameworks, including UN General Assembly resolutions and the Convention on Biological Diversity, limited evidence on seamount ecosystem functioning and human benefits continues to hinder effective management. Expected differences between ecoregions and ocean basins further underscore the need for comparable observations across regions.

Progress on these challenges is constrained by compounding structural and financial barriers. Deep-ocean research is capital-intensive, yet most often, only supported through short funding cycles poorly suited to sustained, systematic observation. Many data remain fragmented across incompatible formats and inconsistent standards, limiting integration across studies and regions. A substantial portion of data already collected is never fully analyzed, creating a form of underexplored data. Further, geographic coverage remains uneven, with sampling concentrated in accessible regions, making it difficult to distinguish genuine ecological patterns from gaps in observation. Addressing these challenges collectively requires coordinated international effort, shared infrastructure, and sustained investment, which is a task that exceeds the capacity of any single nation or institution.

In response, we established the effort to build an international Seamount Science Program (SEAMOUNTS) as a tool to coordinate global research efforts, attract new funding, build comparable baselines across ocean regions, and develop models capable of forecasting ecosystem responses under different environmental and management scenarios.

Vision, Mission, and Scope

Vision: A globally connected and aligned scientific community advancing frontier ocean science and next-generation technologies to reveal seamounts as fundamental components of the Earth–ocean system, while providing the knowledge base needed for their responsible stewardship and governance.

Mission: Deliver scientific excellence through a globally coordinated, multidisciplinary, and community-driven research framework that aims to transform understanding of seamount systems across geological, physical, biological, biogeochemical, and socio-ecological dimensions.

Scope: SEAMOUNTS is envisioned as a 10-year international research program, co-designed by the global seamount community and guided by an internationally endorsed science plan. Its scope is to build an integrated, globally coordinated framework that links geology, oceanography and biogeochemistry, biology and ecology, and social sciences to advance standardized, comparable seamount research across ocean basins. The Program will mobilize shared infrastructure, data systems, and training to accelerate discovery, enable synthesis and forecasting, and provide a stronger evidence base to support responsible stewardship and effective governance.

Core Principles and Themes: The design and implementation of SEAMOUNTS are guided by a set of shared principles that underpin scientific excellence and rigor, inclusivity, and long-term impact:

• Scientific Best-Practice & Systematic Research: Advance frontier, hypothesis-driven research through rigorous, standardized, and comparable methods that deliver reproducible insights into seamount systems and their global roles.

• Innovation & Next-Generation Observing: Leverage and co-develop cutting-edge observing technologies, autonomous platforms, modeling, forecasting, and data science to resolve and compare seamount processes across scales and ocean basins.

• Reference Sites, Observatories & Natural Laboratories: Establish reference seamount sites, regional clusters, and long-term observatories as shared natural laboratories for coordinated, comparative research and long-term change monitoring.

• Open, FAIR & Interoperable Science: Produce standardized, interoperable, openly accessible data and synthesis products that enable reuse, cross-site comparison, forecasting, and digital representations of seamount systems (e.g., Digital Twins).

• Capacity Building, Equity, Inclusion, & Community Leadership: Foster meaningful participation across regions, disciplines, and career stages, centering Early Career Ocean Professionals and low- and middle-income country partners, through training, mentorship, and co-creation with the international seamount science community.

• Societal Relevance, Stewardship & Science-to-Policy: Translate scientific advances into decision-relevant guidance (e.g., assessments, scenarios, decision-support tools) that supports precautionary, adaptive, and equitable stewardship, while preserving scientific independence and ambition.

• Legacy & Longevity: Create enduring infrastructure, reference sites, shared protocols, data resources, and trained capacity that outlast the Program and continue to benefit science, governance, and society.

Policy and Outreach Linkages

SEAMOUNTS is designed to advance international, frontier seamount science, while delivering a range of scientific, societal, and policy-relevant outcomes. The Program generates integrated, process-based knowledge of seamount systems, which provide a robust evidence base that can be utilized across multiple domains, including ocean governance and sustainable development.

One important outcome is support for global ocean governance, particularly under the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement and related international frameworks. Because many seamounts lie in areas beyond national jurisdiction, robust evidence on their ecology, connectivity, ecosystem services, and vulnerability is critical for effective area-based management, environmental impact assessments, and strategic planning under BBNJ.

Beyond governance, the Program will support various decisions about seamount systems, in terms of activities related to fisheries, marine genetic resources, conservation, cultural values, and other ocean-economy activities.

To achieve these goals, the Program aims to deploy open and interoperable data systems, shared databases, modeling and forecasting tools, and digital twin development. These will be complemented by targeted ecosystem assessments, policy briefs, scientific syntheses, visualizations, and other accessible communication products. Through these mechanisms, the Program will turn seamount science into practical evidence for governance, management, and societal benefit, while implementation remains with established competent authorities.

Roadmap 2026: Development of SEAMOUNTS will proceed through a structured, co-creative roadmap, closely following and building upon existing international seamount research efforts. A Planning Committee will be established, with 2–3 geographically distributed co-leads for each Program Theme. In a first step, each Theme will hold one or two virtual consultations with domain experts to define 2–4 priority research questions, the actions needed to address them, and the expected outputs. Next, two to three cross-disciplinary workshops will be organized to develop 3–4 cross-cutting work areas that integrate geomorphological, physical, biological, biogeochemical, technological, and social dimensions of seamount systems. A Core Planning Team will coordinate and support actions and align directions with anticipated sponsors.

The roadmap will explicitly leverage the outcomes of previous and ongoing seamount initiatives and will be closely aligned with UN Ocean Decade activities and other relevant international efforts whose representatives are engaged in the Planning Committee. Formal endorsement of the Program will be sought from the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO).

Planning activities will consider engagement in a series of international conferences in 2026, including conference sessions, town halls, or dedicated workshops, to refine the co-created Science Plan content, expand the global community of participants, mobilize governmental, philanthropic, and private-sector resources and partnerships, and prepare for Program implementation commencing early 2027.

Sincerely,

The SEAMOUNTS Planning Committee, 18th August 2026