What does detailed mapping of our seas look like? Let me describe it, with the help of a truly fascinating new book, a fascinating new study, published this week—I'm not here to plug it; it's useful to explain what I'm talking about. But you may have read about it, actually, or heard about it in the news this week. The study was done by marine historian Innes McCartney. It's called Echoes from the Deep, and the echo referring to the multibeam sonar on the Prince Madog, because it's to the Prince Madog that Innes McCartney turned to carry out a quite incredible study of shipwrecks in the Irish sea. Now, the research features 273 shipwrecks, and 129 of those surveys, in incredible detail, down there in the depths of the Irish sea, have either identified ships for the very first time—we just didn't know which ships they were—or they had been misidentified. Some of those are huge and many well over 100m long. Ships sunk by U-boats; a world war fought off the coast of Wales. One of those victims of the U-boats was the SS Mesaba, torpedoed in 1919. Seven years previously, she was one of the ships that intercepted the distress calls of the Titanic. Now, the evidence provided by the Prince Madog is there, clear for us to see. History, you're coming alive from the depths of the sea off the coast of Wales.

What's the significance of this to my pitch today? Well, the technology that can identify ships in minute detail on the sea bed can map our marine landscape for a host of other applications: environmental, economic, for fisheries, for offshore energy. And this is detail, this is information that we need for our future, and there's so much that just hasn't been mapped. So, I'm asking Government to come to the table to discuss how we can get the ball rolling on a new national marine mapping programme for Welsh territorial waters. And we have a lot of territorial waters. We're often called the 'land of song'; perhaps it should be the 'sea of song' because we have more sea than we have land—around 50 per cent more. There's 21,000 sq km of land, 30,000 sq km of Welsh territorial sea beds. And 'môr o ganu', incidentally, works very well in Welsh, as a well-known phrase describing us as a nation when we're really in full voice.

Since 2010, the SEACAMS and SEACAMS2 projects at Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences have been responsible for undertaking the most expansive sea bed mapping study ever undertaken in Welsh territorial waters. High-resolution multibeam sonar surveys, covering more than 1 million acres, 5,000 sq km of sea bed have been undertaken, surveys carried out over a total linear distance of more than 45,000 km—that's greater than the circumference of the earth—and it's not just done for fun. It's not just done for books. The mapping data has provided the baseline information for the vast majority of existing marine industry activity and new initiatives; all sorts of marine energy projects have benefited.

Now, SEACAMS stands for sustainable expansion of applied coastal and marine sectors. It's about application of this research for economic activity. But maybe I should've said that's what SEACAMS did stand for, because the SEACAMS programme ended in April 2022—EU funded. There's another Welsh European Funding Office project, the Smart Efficient Energy Centre, running for just a few more months now, but after these projects, there are no successor projects post Brexit that have enabled us to plan ahead, to use the capabilities and the expertise of the department at Bangor University. We need to act now to plan how we can keep, let alone exploit and maximise the potential of, the Prince Madog and the expertise sitting behind it beyond next year. The idea of losing this is something that I'm very, very worried about and I'm very keen to avoid. I hope the Minister agrees with that. If we lose this expertise, we'll really struggle to get it back, and currently many contracts, as I understand, are set to expire in April next year. I'm hoping to hear from the Minister that she's willing to engage quickly on this matter.

I could spell out the figures—costs, actually—that the team at the Centre for Applied Marine Sciences have shared with me. I don't think we need to go to the details of daily charter rates and data processing costs and that kind of thing here, but suffice to say that a cutting-edge programme, funded to the tune of hundreds of thousands rather than the many, many millions, could underpin a venture of real national significance here, allowing us to reap many, many times that as we make the most of the resources that we have in the seas all around us, be that fisheries or energy.

We need to know what's there. We wouldn't settle for not knowing every square kilometre of land in minute detail, and the seas around us require the same focus, and a strategic sea bed mapping programme, led by Bangor University's Centre for Applied Marine Sciences, can hugely increase our knowledge and understanding of Wales's marine environment. We'd all benefit from it.

Very, very briefly—