I agree it would be useful to have Standard Marine Places. We’re taking piecemeal steps in this direction with adding the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of iNaturalist Network countries (e.g. Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Portugal, NZ has a couple of legacy ones that don’t conform exactly), though they are not yet standard places. They’re based on the aforementioned marineregions.org, which is an incredible resource. However, each file still needs additional work to subtract the space of the associated country boundary in iNaturalist (the Standard Place) and then find & fix gaps, holes, and overlap along/within the neighboring places. It’s a lot painstaking work, and if you try to over-automate gap filling I think accidents like this can happen.
New places, more than many other parts of the site, can create a large infrastructure burden, which is why the size and complexity of new places are limited. When someone add or edits extremely large or complex (and/or highly observose) places, it can cause the site to slow down, so when we do these as staff we test and then schedule these kinds of changes.
This is all to explain that adding places for all the world’s oceans is a substantial undertaking that requires staff time/coordination, so I think it’s unlikely to happen in the near term in the context of other priorities, but it’s on our minds.
(Sorry I wrote this a while ago but didn’t post it until I rediscovered the tab… eek)