An NCEI team, U.S. Extended Continental Shelf

The CIRES team at the National Centers for Environmental Information played a critical role in establishing the outer limits of the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf (ECS), which added nearly one million square kilometers of seafloor to the United States to manage or conserve. The award is the culmination of a 20+ year effort by 14 federal agencies and numerous academic institutions. This team of five developed a data organizational system to define continental shelves consistently, producing over 2,000 pages of documentation and creating 1,000 maps and figures. Because of the efforts of these dedicated CIRES employees, the United States is now in a position to conserve and manage the resources of a new area about twice the size of California.