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NOAA Releases New Views of Earth's Ocean Floor

Posted by samzenpus on from the down-where-it's-wetter dept.

fishmike writes "NOAA has made sea floor maps and other data on the world's coasts, continental shelves and deep ocean available for easy viewing online. Anyone with Internet access can now explore undersea features and obtain detailed depictions of the sea floor and coasts, including deep canyons, ripples, landslides and likely fish habitat. The new online data viewer compiles sea floor data from the near shore to the deep blue, including the latest high-resolution bathymetric (sea bottom) data collected by NOAA's Office of Coast Survey primarily to support nautical charting."

7 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. How long until... by dgatwood · · Score: 2

    ...it is shown in Google Maps? More to the point, how long before long, straight stretches of seabed start to affect driving directions?

    Step 23: Swim across the Marianas Trench.

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  2. Google Maps for the Oceans? by dryriver · · Score: 5, Informative

    It seems to work much the same way Google Maps/Earth, except that you can dial in different data overlays like : Fishmaps, Geological maps, Hazards (Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Volcanoes). Quite neat. And probably very useful if you are a scientist/academic studying this kind of data.

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  3. Are you sure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can we really trust liberal big government scientists to give us an unbiased view of the ocean floor? I just think we should wait until all the facts are in before we take their word for it.

    1. Re:Are you sure? by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Funny

      And where are the dragons?? Ocean maps always had dragons on them until liberal Eastern intellectuals got involved. I firmly believe that we should be teaching Dragon Theory in oceanography classes. If not, we should at least be teaching how Dragon Theory is being suppressed by the liberal media intelligentsia.

    2. Re:Are you sure? by TheRedDuke · · Score: 2

      Good news - most of the big oil companies have contributed and/or paid for data in this collection, so at least some of the data will be trustworthy.

  4. Re:Squiggly lines? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    They're called ship tracklines. They are the path of the ship that made the bathymetry (water depth) survey. Generally speaking, there is broad, low-resolution bathymetry from all the world's oceans. It is derived from satellite gravity measurements. On top of that there are "groundtruth" surveys conducted by ships with fathometers to measure the ocean depth. Inevitably, these differ by a slight amount from the lower-resolution data. Ship tracks will have a variety of geometries, but if you are trying to cover a specific area, a grid-like geometry is common. Put those more precise values into the lower-resolution grid and you get interesting-looking patterns that have nothing to do with the actual sea-floor bathymetry. They just represent the places the ship traveled.

  5. Re:Been waiting for this since the 90's... by youn · · Score: 2

    What do we really know about outer space... up until recently we were not sure there were planets in other solar systems, we were not even sure there was water on the moon... so it is a fair question, what do we really know about outer space?

    And yes I would like to learn more about the ocean floor too :)

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