The GEBCO_2021 Grid is a global continuous terrain model for ocean and land with a spatial resolution of 15 arc seconds. The GEBCO_2021 Grid Collection comprises the following data types: the standard grid (ice surface elevation), the standard grid including sub-ice topography information for Greenland and Antarctica, and the Type Identifier Grid (TID). The Type Identifier Grid indicates the type of source data that the corresponding grid cell in the bathymetric grid is based on. The GEBCO_2021 Grid Collection also comprises all available data formats, including ESRI ASCII raster, GeoTIFF, and NetCDF. This data collection also contains the published and citable GEBCO_2021 grid (standard grid of ice surface elevation) available in NetCDF format.

In regions outside of the Arctic Ocean area, the grid uses as a base Version 2.2 of the SRTM15_plus data set (Tozer, B. et al, 2019). This data set is a fusion of land topography with measured and estimated seafloor topography. Included on top of this base grid are gridded bathymetric data sets developed by the four Regional Centers of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. The GEBCO_2021 Grid represents all data within the 2021 compilation. The compilation of the GEBCO_2021 Grid was carried out at the Seabed 2030 Global Center, hosted at the National Oceanography Centre, UK, with the aim of producing a seamless global terrain model. Outside of Polar regions, the Regional Centers provide their data sets as sparse grids i.e. only grid cells that contain data are populated. These data sets were included on to the base grid without any blending. The data sets supplied in the form of complete grids (primarily areas north of 60N and south of 50S) were included using feather blending techniques from GlobalMapper software. The GEBCO_2021 Grid has been developed through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. This is a collaborative project between the Nippon Foundation of Japan and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). It aims to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce the definitive map of the world ocean floor by 2030 and make it available to all. Funded by the Nippon Foundation, the four Seabed 2030 Regional Centers include the Southern Ocean - hosted at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany; South and West Pacific Ocean - hosted at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand; Atlantic and Indian Oceans - hosted at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA; Arctic and North Pacific Oceans - hosted at Stockholm University, Sweden and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, USA.