The Great Australian Bight Marine Park extends across the continental shelf and far out to the deep ocean. It protects a globally important area for endangered southern right whales, which aggregate in the region for calving each year. The marine park includes part of the world’s largest known temperate carbonate platform, and protects unique soft sediment ecosystems that are considered globally significant for their diversity of sponges, ascidians and bryozoans.

The park is located about 12 kilometres south-east of Eucla and 174 km west of Ceduna, adjacent to the South Australian Far West and Nuyts Archipelago Marine Parks. It covers 45,822 square kilometres, and has National Park, Multiple Use, Special Purpose (Mining Exclusion) and Special Purpose zones. – Parks Australia

Great Australian Bight ranges from less than 10 to 5,726 metres depth, with an average depth of 1,463 metres. The majority of the park (42%) falls within the mesophotic zone (30-70 metres) [view on map]. The mapped areas of the seafloor are dominated by Plane (68%) and Slope (10%) morphological features. [view on map].

Based on annotations from publicly available seafloor imagery (Squidle+), the five most dominant seafloor categories in this Park are:

• Shallow: no public imagery available
• Mesophotic: sand (94%), non-coral cnidaria (1%), mixed coarse sediments (1%), sponges (1%), unidentified (1%)
• Rariphotic to Abyss: no public imagery available