#ocean maps

MH370 Search Maps Shed Light on remote Depths of Indian Ocean

Australian search team images show ocean floor’s mountains, rift valleys and shipwrecks in unprecedented detail.

Why do we want to map the floor of the ocean? To learn more about our Earth. Makes sense. But then when this knowledge enters the public domain, how will it be used? This excerpt asks that question:

As Ballard said last year at the Forum for Future Ocean Floor Mapping: “They tell children that their generation is going to explore more of Earth than all previous generations combined. As soon as we finish that map, the explorers are right behind.” The question of just what kind of explorers those will be—those searching for knowledge or riches, seeking to preserve or extract—remains to be seen.

More about the mapping project:

In June, an international team of oceanographers launched the first effort to create a comprehensive map of all the world’s oceans. To map some 140 million square miles of sea floor, the Seabed 2030 project is currently recruiting around 100 ships that will circumscribe the globe for 13 years. The team, united under the non-profit group General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), recently announced it had received $18.5 million dollars from the Nippon Foundation for its efforts.

Many oceanographers hail the project as an illumination of a geological and biological world that is long overdue. It could also be potentially lifesaving: Even today, the lack of a detailed map can be deadly, as was the case when the USS San Francisco crashed into an uncharted mountain in 2005. “People have been excited about going to different planets,” says Martin Jakobsson, professor of marine geology and geophysics at Stockholm University, but “we haven’t been able to bring the attention to our own Earth in the same way as Mars. It hasn’t been easy to rally the whole world behind us.”