What Is Ocean Floor Mapping

The first primitive maps of the sea floor came from soundings which involved lowering weighted lines into the water and noting when the tension on the line slackened.

What is ocean floor mapping.

Huge trenches walls flatlands and seamounts fill the seascape and have a direct impact on the water bodies above them. The depth was then measured by the amount of line that had payed out. The nippon foundation gebco seabed 2030 project has mapped one fifth of the world s ocean floor. Typically finely wrought ocean maps have been the result of extensive sonar.

In other words it is the underwater equivalent to topography. The latest status of its seabed 2030 project was announced to coincide with world hydrography day. A history of ocean floor mapping and dating the ocean floor is a mysterious place that marine geologists and oceanographers have struggled to fully grasp. Ocean floor mapping has two or three essential aspects a bathymetry depth and b magnetometry and sometimes c gravimetry.

Bob embley geophysicist noaa pacific marine environmental laboratory. In fact scientists have mapped more of the surface of the moon mars and venus than the surface of our ocean. It is a global initiative between japan s non profit nippon foundation and the general bathymetric chart of the oceans gebco which is the only intergovernmental organisation to map the entire. This is expensive and time consuming so sonar maps are mostly only made of places where ships spend the most time.

Plate tectonics and the ocean floor bathymetry the shape of the ocean floor is largely a result of a process called plate tectonics. Bathymetric measurements are conducted with various methods from sonar and lidar techniques to buoys and satellite altimetry. It is the only intergovernmental organisation with a mandate to map the entire ocean floor. Seafloor mapping also called seabed imaging is the measurement of water depth of a given body of water.

A the bathymetry is being continuously improved by icebreaker.