The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) is an expert group of SCAR since the XXVIII SCAR Conference held on 30th July 2004 in Bremen Germany and a regional Mapping project of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean (GEBCO) operated under the joint auspices of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) (of UNESCO) and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO). The objective of IBCSO is to produce the first seamless bathymetric grid for the area south of latitude 60° S surrounding Antarctica. This will be a benefit for several scientific purposes including (a) interpretation of seabed geology, (b) the building of habitat models and maps, and (c) mapping and tracing of deep ocean current pathways. In addition the IBCSO will serve as an indispensable database for new nautical Charts in the Southern Ocean to improve the safety of navigation in Antarctic waters. After the inaugural meeting in 2004, the Editorial Board was then established at the 1st IBCSO Meeting at Santa Barbara in 2007 including ambassadors of several SCAR member countries. Since then plenty of institutions holding bathymetric data in the Southern Ocean have been asked for a contribution to the IBCSO dataset. Gathering, compilation and analyses of bathymetric data turned out to be larger and more time consuming tasks than first envisioned. For this reason, there has not yet been an IBCSO gridded digital bathymetric model released. However, a first version is now scheduled to be released during the fall of 2012. It is proposed to give an overview in what has been done in the IBCSO project in the last years for the creation of IBCSO v1. This will include acknowledgements to the data contributors and a short explanation of the working steps data acquisition, homogenization, cleaning and gridding. Furthermore information on the current status of the grid production and previews of preliminary sections of the new dataset will be given.