Super-Detailed Interactive 3-D Seafloor Map by Nick Stockton.
From the post:
This super-detailed map of the ocean floor’s topography is based on satellite measurements of subtle lumps on the ocean’s surface. These lumps of water, which are subtle, low, and wide on the ocean’s surface, are caused by the gravitational pull of underwater features like mountains and ridges. The team of scientists wrapped their data around a Google Earth globe, so you and I could explore it ourselves, in the visualization above.
The map has more than twice the resolution of previous seafloor maps, and shows a plethora of never-before-seen features. These include thousands of volcanoes and what could be the ridge where two plates pulled apart to create the Gulf of Mexico. The map is part of new research published last week in Science.
The visualization at the top of the page (click here for a full screen view) lets you play with the vertical exaggeration of both continental and subsea topography using the upper left drop-down menu. (They might seem huge to us at ground level, but the planet’s mountains and valleys are almost imperceptible from the vantage of space.) Another visualization of the study’s map lets you drag a time bar to simulate the movement of tectonic plates.
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Great seafloor map and visualization techniques!
Read Nick’s post to get some background on “gravitational mapping.” In short, gravitational mapping relies on the impact of features of the seafloor on ocean height to create detailed seafloor maps.
Sounds like very interesting data sets with many discoveries left to be made.