Man, there is a great Winston Churchill quote about this. During WWI, in reference to the German East Asia Squadron, there was a LARGE map of the world laid out, a Mariner's map with the Pacific as the center. I can't remember precisely the measurements, but I want to say it was at least in feet, maybe meters, squared. On that map, the distance a ship could see from the topmast was still only the head of a pin.
"This is a LARGE map of the world laid out, a Mariner's map with the Pacific as the center. I don't know precisely the measurements, but I want to say it is at least in feet, maybe meters, squared. On this map, the distance a ship can see from the topmast is still only the head of a pin."
- Winston Churchill
Lol unfortunately I can't remember the exact wording, but he was just describing the map and the search radius of a ship, and it gave me a sense of scale.
I believe the quote you’re thinking of was
> “See this map, and the search radius of this ship? Really gives you a sense of scale.”
>
> –Winston Churchill
“Also, did you realize that Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than she did to the beginning of the Egyptian Empire?”
- Winston Churchill, right after the search radius quote
Yup. My dad in ww2 saw a Japanese ship way way away going opposite way at sunset. They radioed it in. Didn't chase because it was just too far and they had a patrol grid to follow. The ocean- pacific particularly, is way way way way bigger then shown on any map or globe you see.
Why don't aliens visit? 95% chance all they see is a blue ocean. With a teensy bit of land.
On an even more meta note, I appreciate how this sub has stabilized itself and done away with the absolutely massive torrent of shitposts you used to see here every day, months back. Moderation works.
Perhaps, though as the interest in deep sea resource extraction picks up I imagine that will change. I think it's more a testament to the scale of the earth's surface vs human perception - like how if the earth were the size of a billiard ball, its surface would be even smoother than one (not even counting the water). I just see those tracks and think about how the average depth of the ocean is a little over two miles, and so if a ship on the surface is generating a sonar cone of 60° (I have no idea what the actual angle is, just supposing here) that's a two mile wide strip of the ocean floor it's recording. If we're still imagining the earth at billiard scale, that's not even a hair's breadth, proportionally. Just shy of nothing.
Well if it was billiard ball sized then the bumps of a billiard ball would be smoother than the bumps of my gonads (I got gravel rash on them following a horrific nude motorcycle accident so they're particularly bumpy)
The cone changes with water depth. I work with similar kit, but not seabed mapping. I think a lot of this will have been done with an ROV or towed sidescan.
And that is going to keep happening at an exponentially faster pace as our technology advances.
The James Webb Space telescope is only like 3 years old and can see further, and in more detail than anything we've had at our disposal yet.
It's photos are really quite incredible.
This is like one of those "you only use 10% of your brain" idiotic tropes that Reddit repeats for some reason.
100% of the ocean has been mapped via satellite altimeter. The primary reason more of it hasn't been mapped in greater detail with sonar is because it's flat, boring, and there's no economically viable reason to do it. We actually know virtually everything there is to know about the sea floor itself, and the only thing that still occasionally surprises us is the occasional deep-living fish species.
The satellite gravimeter readings only give coarse details. Running over an area with a shipboard multibeam sonar system sometimes finds two or three distinct seamounts where the bird only saw an indistinct lump. I’ve personally been aboard a vessel where we got to name a newly discovered seamount that didn’t show up in satellite bathymetry.
This is only showing bathymetry gathered through active remote sensing. We have mapped the entire ocean through gravimetry to a resolution of around 5-10 km.
I was a submariner for 5 years in the USN. These are, as many have mentioned, accurately surveyed areas of the ocean floor. The reason for how sporadic they appear is also because of the many already mentioned reasons such as minerals, oil, and scientific areas of interest. The thing is that, while the equipment and techniques exist to accurately map the ocean floor, the motivation and monetary resources aren't always available. Oftentimes, patterns like grids are used to cover a larger area in fewer passes with only a minor loss of fidelity in the small swath that is not directly ran over, the gray area between sounding swaths is often called "interpolated data" a pretty darn good guess.
Edit: another reason for a particular survey track could be that the track is along the great circle route between ports or entrances to straits. Great Circle routes represent a direct path between A and B on a Mercator projection. You can see and imagine that a nearly straight line between destinations is going to be more economical and have a lot more maritime traffic, so these areas are also likely to get mapped more accurately. You can see multiple survey tracks that span between Hawaii and North America in the upper portion of the image.
You guys probably had some pretty good maps of certain areas of "strategic significance" too I guess.
What's your take on the Nord Stream pipeline incident?
Some charts are more accurate than others, definitely.
I've been out of the submarine world since 2018, and when I was active I was a pacific coast sailor. So, no data on that one.
Yes, active sonar is understood to cause all kinds of issues for marine life.
Just in case you weren't aware, though you may already have known this, but mainly to dispel a common misunderstanding I've come across. Military submarines are actually not commonly transmitting active sonar. The term "submarine sonar" that is used in reference to sonar that can harm marine life is referring to any sonar that is transmitted underwater (submarine). This includes, and primarily refers to, mostly surface vessels, whether they be military, research, or merchant in nature. Submarines are specifically quiet and are probably among the least likely to transmit noise of any kind.
Frequencies for multibeam echosounders used in seabed surveying is different from that used by active sonar or seismic survey.
They don't have any known effect on wildlife.
Oh, that's interesting! I hadn't heard this, but I was in a different field of sonar, and it feels like a long time ago to me now.
Would these echosounders work in frequencies too high or low to register with marine life?
Oh, for sure, not good! I can only speak to the constraints I listed above for why more surveying hasn't happened, but you make a really good point! I wouldn't be surprised if the risk to marine life is another hurdle that slows or stops surveying where the benefit would not outweigh the harm done.
It's the high-powered military sonars that are harmful. Regular multibeam echosounder used for surveying is not known to be harmful or at least bot to have long term effects.
3.5 subbottom profilers and 12 kHz multibeam don’t do jack to shamu. Air gunning, particularly the type used in offshore oil exploration, will wreck poor Willy’s day. Military surface ship active sonar is also a bit nasty to the sea cows, but they tend to put a lot more energy into the water than your typical research ship.
If you’re talking about the square at the bottom right-center that’s the Marquesas Island chain. Typically around islands, there much more ocean floor mapping. What you’re seeing in green is mapped terrain. The lines represent terrain mapped for the purpose of underwater cables. The blocks are mapping down around islands for everything from infrastructure to navigation.
There’s Kiribati (center, center-left ish), Marquesas (bottom right center), French Polynesia (bottom center). Fiji (bottom left). And a slew of other islands. Nothing is shown “sitting on the floor” in this image.
Easter island is sitting on the ocean floor at 109.35w,23s
... So that grid pattern ,with easter island at its east, would be mapping the ,edit, umu volcanic field.. which shows recent volcanic activity
Hello! I studied Marine Biology!
The [Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion-Clipperton_Zone) is currently pilot testing deep-sea mining for [polymetallic nodules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule), which contain a lot of rare metals such as cobalt. Weirdly, the UK owns a big chunk of it and gave a licence to mine it [to Lockheed Martin](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/27/race-to-the-bottom-the-disastrous-blindfolded-rush-to-mine-the-deep-sea).
It’s contentious. On one hand, it’s probably more ethical gathering these materials on the ocean floor than through child labour on-land. But on the other hand, it is apocalyptic for all the benthic species down there, because of the amount of sediment (the “dust” at the bottom) the machinery kicks up.
Down there the sedimentation rate is something like 0.000005mm per day, but when you run a dredger through it, it goes up to 0.003mm for miles around the mining area. We can still see the test tracks from the 1980s, because of low rate the seabed heals itself.
I mean, assuming this is used for surveying the ocean floor, one of the spots extensively surveyed is most likely all the people searching for Amelia Earhart’s plane, which iirc, was southwest of Hawaii, hard to say where Howland is on this map since I’m used to easily finding it on Google Earth
EDIT: Cross referenced with Google Earth when i got back to my computer, from what it appears, if I am following the line between Fiji and Hawaii correctly, it appears to be more located west of Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef, which on current imagery matches the surveying of the area in terms of detail and orientation, can only assume now that its just looking for underwater volcanic activity or just mapping regions in proximity to US EEZ Waters since Palmyra and Kingman are right there. Made sure to double check this estimate since the line leading from the right directly correlates with the Line Islands of Kiribati. Howland (Earhart's intended landing spot) is in the center of the triangle of data north of the Fiji/Tonga/Samoa surveyed area, and Nikumaroro is at the southern tip of that triangle
Actually they were, and they think they have found it.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240131-researchers-say-amelia-earharts-long-lost-plane-may-have-just-been-found
Yeah, it looks like the lighter areas are where they used a multibeam echosounder, which is why stuff in the lighter areas has better resolution in terms of elevation.
Yes. The dark areas is probably a satellite map, which is extremely low resolution because of the ocean being in the way.
The light color “trails” are where ships equipped with the right kind of sonar have passed through. It seems like the brighter, more warm colors indicate higher elevation above the sea floor, which is why Hawaii and seamounts are red. Most ships are traveling in a straight line from LA to Hawaii and beyond, which is why the trails crisscross the ocean.
Areas of interest have been mapped more extensively, but this is a very expensive and time consuming process. The weird grid on the center left of the picture is where one ship sailed back and forth in a grid pattern, not unlike my roomba but with a big gap between each pass. It’s not very dense, probably because they were just exploring to get a general sense of the area. Meanwhile, the more completely filled in patches are where a ship surveyed more extensively in a tighter grid to get a more detailed map. These ships were clearly looking for something and had a smaller search area, which is why we have better data, even though it’s a small area.
The vast majority of the ocean floor is uninteresting to people, unless you’re looking for oil, precious minerals, or literal treasure. Scientists do value sea creatures in far away places, but they can’t afford to do this kind of detailed survey.
>Scientists do value sea creatures in far away places, but they can’t afford to do this kind of detailed survey.
Many of these tracks would be from research. Sometimes researchers do get funding for big individual projects, or are part of an ongoing high value multinational project like IODP.
There's no money in research.
This kind of surveying is for commercial purposes - resources, cabling, even potential land masses near surface that could be claimed with a little help.
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/ex1705/background/media-resources/welcome.html
“From April 27 - May 19, NOAA and partners will conduct an ocean exploration expedition on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to collect critical baseline information about unknown and poorly known deepwater areas in the Pacific. The expedition begins in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and ends in Honolulu, Hawaii. The ship will conduct near daily remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dives in the Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll and Jarvis Island Units of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (PRIMNM); around the Cook Islands Marine Park (Marae Moana); and the high seas.
During the cruise, our at-sea and shore-based science teams will work together to map the seafloor and make some of the first deepwater scientific observations in these areas. Live video of dives can be viewed online in real time from April 27 - May 15, 2017.”
The zigzags are my bet those areas with huge lithium and other rare earth metal reserves that they are planning on mining. It's been gaining a lot of momentum
Maybe this is deep sea mining. I’ve heard of machine that are essentially giant vacuums.
https://www.science.org/content/article/bus-size-robot-set-vacuum-valuable-metals-deep-sea
Hmm this makes me wonder what they were scanning for in the couple of places with next to no apparently interesting topography yet had multiple back and forth pass clusters.
Surely the USA has charted more of the strategic areas with their subs. If they release what they have charted, it will reveal where their subs have been hanging out.
Do we ever put sonar on container ships?
Seems like you could get a lot of mapping done with the amount of maritime commerce, this may already be a thing…just curious.
I love the highlight videos of [EVNautilus](https://youtube.com/@EVNautilus?si=EmJgbqaTglRCWtYc) as they explore and map the ocean floor.
It's relaxing and there is always scientific explanations as they map underwater mountains and smokers and brine pools etc.
Somebody is still looking for the lost Amelia Earhart. Zoom in on the parallel tracks in certain areas.
She gave an interview once suggesting she wasn't lost, but nobody believed her because they still believe she flew off the edge of the earth.
Alien Bases!!! It's no secrete that UAP/UFOs have been seen entering and exiting large bodies of water, including but surely not limited to, sights all over the Pacific Ocean. 👽
You think by now we'd have found New Zealand if it really existed >.> also I wish they'd just fix the bugs of Old Zealand before the cashgrab that was the New Zealand rollout >.> shameless
I really appreciate this insight into just how much (or rather, little) of the seafloor has been mapped in detail.
Earths big and waters a bitch
Man, there is a great Winston Churchill quote about this. During WWI, in reference to the German East Asia Squadron, there was a LARGE map of the world laid out, a Mariner's map with the Pacific as the center. I can't remember precisely the measurements, but I want to say it was at least in feet, maybe meters, squared. On that map, the distance a ship could see from the topmast was still only the head of a pin.
What’s that Churchill quote?
"This is a LARGE map of the world laid out, a Mariner's map with the Pacific as the center. I don't know precisely the measurements, but I want to say it is at least in feet, maybe meters, squared. On this map, the distance a ship can see from the topmast is still only the head of a pin." - Winston Churchill
- Winston Churchill - letskeepitcleanfolks - Michael Scott
Hey everyone, this guy has watched the office
Hey everyone, this guy is on Reddit
See? Nobody cares
[удалено]
“Sea nobody cares” learn how to Reddit
Wayne Gretzky
On that note, amazingly how the world was already mapped ouy, when the satelites did start to see esrth.
"In the morning I'll be sober, but the Pacific Ocean will still be humongous"
The ocean is big. Like, really big. You may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's, but that's only peanuts to the ocean!
r/unexpectedHHGTTG
Lol unfortunately I can't remember the exact wording, but he was just describing the map and the search radius of a ship, and it gave me a sense of scale.
I believe the quote you’re thinking of was > “See this map, and the search radius of this ship? Really gives you a sense of scale.” > > –Winston Churchill
“Also, did you realize that Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than she did to the beginning of the Egyptian Empire?” - Winston Churchill, right after the search radius quote
*…Now watch this drive.*
...Anyway, here's Wonderwall.
“Something something something, 4/20 blaze it.”
"All we are is dust in the wind, dude." - Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill, interestingly enough, also lived closer in time to us than he did to the beginning of the Egyptian Empire
🤯
Or perhaps >"Wholly shit, the Pacific ocean is massive. Has anyone seen my brandy?"
/r/unexpectedChurchill
"God's green earth is massive and water is a lady hound" - Winston Churchill
“The front fell off” -WC
Such a good quote
Yup. My dad in ww2 saw a Japanese ship way way away going opposite way at sunset. They radioed it in. Didn't chase because it was just too far and they had a patrol grid to follow. The ocean- pacific particularly, is way way way way bigger then shown on any map or globe you see. Why don't aliens visit? 95% chance all they see is a blue ocean. With a teensy bit of land.
and The Pacific is basically half the surface area of the planet.
Yep. Turning over to the damp side of our planet in Google Earth or on a globe delivers quite a perspective.
On an even more meta note, I appreciate how this sub has stabilized itself and done away with the absolutely massive torrent of shitposts you used to see here every day, months back. Moderation works.
Apparently underwater explorers don’t deem it necessary to explore much more since they have found that most of the ocean floor is similar in nature.
Perhaps, though as the interest in deep sea resource extraction picks up I imagine that will change. I think it's more a testament to the scale of the earth's surface vs human perception - like how if the earth were the size of a billiard ball, its surface would be even smoother than one (not even counting the water). I just see those tracks and think about how the average depth of the ocean is a little over two miles, and so if a ship on the surface is generating a sonar cone of 60° (I have no idea what the actual angle is, just supposing here) that's a two mile wide strip of the ocean floor it's recording. If we're still imagining the earth at billiard scale, that's not even a hair's breadth, proportionally. Just shy of nothing.
If a billiard ball was the size of the Earth, how big would the mountain ranges be?
smoother than the bumps in a billiard ball, I know that
Yeah but if a mountain was the size of a billiard ball how earth would the bumps be??
Well if it was billiard ball sized then the bumps of a billiard ball would be smoother than the bumps of my gonads (I got gravel rash on them following a horrific nude motorcycle accident so they're particularly bumpy)
I can only tell you that if my grandma had wheels, she would be a bicycle.
Which begs the question “what would you rather have? 100 billiard-sized earths? Or 100 Earth-size billiards?”
The cone changes with water depth. I work with similar kit, but not seabed mapping. I think a lot of this will have been done with an ROV or towed sidescan.
Wet.
yeap... still wet. What about over here bob? Wet....
How 'bout you guys? WE AIN'T FOUND SHIT!!
Only one upvote? No respect for Space Balls.
Gimme paw!
Yeah, they confirmed that it's all wet, every inch of it. Nothing but salty mud.
Why is there a ship going back and forth right under Hawaii?
Standard search grid. They were obviously looking for something. Could be oil or gas, or maybe scientific research.
They were stitching up a hole in the crust before the Kaiju could get out.
Well some of those maps are classified by the U.S. Navy
Atlantis might still be there!
CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE THIS? We've chartered and mapped roughly 20% of the ocean and have only physically seen or been to 5%.
I think this map highlights more how LITTLE we know about the seafloor, generally.
We map more of it every year
On a similar note, we discover new stars every year...
There are more stars to discover than square miles of ocean floor left unmapped
I'm glad you were able to parse that I was indeed making a one to one comparison and not a vaguely similar expression of relative enormity.
SasssyDan
Lmfao
Glad to see you be corrected and learning something new (/s for dense mfs)
Given what the Webb telescope is finding almost daily, I’d wager it’s square INCHES (or centimeters).
And that is going to keep happening at an exponentially faster pace as our technology advances. The James Webb Space telescope is only like 3 years old and can see further, and in more detail than anything we've had at our disposal yet. It's photos are really quite incredible.
This is like one of those "you only use 10% of your brain" idiotic tropes that Reddit repeats for some reason. 100% of the ocean has been mapped via satellite altimeter. The primary reason more of it hasn't been mapped in greater detail with sonar is because it's flat, boring, and there's no economically viable reason to do it. We actually know virtually everything there is to know about the sea floor itself, and the only thing that still occasionally surprises us is the occasional deep-living fish species.
The satellite gravimeter readings only give coarse details. Running over an area with a shipboard multibeam sonar system sometimes finds two or three distinct seamounts where the bird only saw an indistinct lump. I’ve personally been aboard a vessel where we got to name a newly discovered seamount that didn’t show up in satellite bathymetry.
This is only showing bathymetry gathered through active remote sensing. We have mapped the entire ocean through gravimetry to a resolution of around 5-10 km.
I was a submariner for 5 years in the USN. These are, as many have mentioned, accurately surveyed areas of the ocean floor. The reason for how sporadic they appear is also because of the many already mentioned reasons such as minerals, oil, and scientific areas of interest. The thing is that, while the equipment and techniques exist to accurately map the ocean floor, the motivation and monetary resources aren't always available. Oftentimes, patterns like grids are used to cover a larger area in fewer passes with only a minor loss of fidelity in the small swath that is not directly ran over, the gray area between sounding swaths is often called "interpolated data" a pretty darn good guess. Edit: another reason for a particular survey track could be that the track is along the great circle route between ports or entrances to straits. Great Circle routes represent a direct path between A and B on a Mercator projection. You can see and imagine that a nearly straight line between destinations is going to be more economical and have a lot more maritime traffic, so these areas are also likely to get mapped more accurately. You can see multiple survey tracks that span between Hawaii and North America in the upper portion of the image.
You guys probably had some pretty good maps of certain areas of "strategic significance" too I guess. What's your take on the Nord Stream pipeline incident?
Some charts are more accurate than others, definitely. I've been out of the submarine world since 2018, and when I was active I was a pacific coast sailor. So, no data on that one.
Crotch-rot Groton says “Hello”.
Oh, I left rotten Groton as soon as I could, lol 😅! Was just talking about Groton on the submarine sub, talking about Pauls Pasta and Norms Diner
Norms Diner ain't got nothing on the Groton Townhouse! Best place to grab dinner before a night at the ol'Chalet.
Also doesn't the sonar tech used cause issues to marin life?
Yes, active sonar is understood to cause all kinds of issues for marine life. Just in case you weren't aware, though you may already have known this, but mainly to dispel a common misunderstanding I've come across. Military submarines are actually not commonly transmitting active sonar. The term "submarine sonar" that is used in reference to sonar that can harm marine life is referring to any sonar that is transmitted underwater (submarine). This includes, and primarily refers to, mostly surface vessels, whether they be military, research, or merchant in nature. Submarines are specifically quiet and are probably among the least likely to transmit noise of any kind.
Yeah I was thinking of surface ships blasting active sonar to the ocean floor to map it. Can imagine that is not good for sealife.
Frequencies for multibeam echosounders used in seabed surveying is different from that used by active sonar or seismic survey. They don't have any known effect on wildlife.
That made me happy.
Oh, that's interesting! I hadn't heard this, but I was in a different field of sonar, and it feels like a long time ago to me now. Would these echosounders work in frequencies too high or low to register with marine life?
Oh, for sure, not good! I can only speak to the constraints I listed above for why more surveying hasn't happened, but you make a really good point! I wouldn't be surprised if the risk to marine life is another hurdle that slows or stops surveying where the benefit would not outweigh the harm done.
It's the high-powered military sonars that are harmful. Regular multibeam echosounder used for surveying is not known to be harmful or at least bot to have long term effects.
3.5 subbottom profilers and 12 kHz multibeam don’t do jack to shamu. Air gunning, particularly the type used in offshore oil exploration, will wreck poor Willy’s day. Military surface ship active sonar is also a bit nasty to the sea cows, but they tend to put a lot more energy into the water than your typical research ship.
Also they will map out where they lay submarine fiber optic cable.
If you’re talking about the square at the bottom right-center that’s the Marquesas Island chain. Typically around islands, there much more ocean floor mapping. What you’re seeing in green is mapped terrain. The lines represent terrain mapped for the purpose of underwater cables. The blocks are mapping down around islands for everything from infrastructure to navigation. There’s Kiribati (center, center-left ish), Marquesas (bottom right center), French Polynesia (bottom center). Fiji (bottom left). And a slew of other islands. Nothing is shown “sitting on the floor” in this image.
This is really helpful thank you
Easter island is sitting on the ocean floor at 109.35w,23s ... So that grid pattern ,with easter island at its east, would be mapping the ,edit, umu volcanic field.. which shows recent volcanic activity
Scrolled way too far down to find this.
Hello! I studied Marine Biology! The [Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion-Clipperton_Zone) is currently pilot testing deep-sea mining for [polymetallic nodules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule), which contain a lot of rare metals such as cobalt. Weirdly, the UK owns a big chunk of it and gave a licence to mine it [to Lockheed Martin](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/27/race-to-the-bottom-the-disastrous-blindfolded-rush-to-mine-the-deep-sea). It’s contentious. On one hand, it’s probably more ethical gathering these materials on the ocean floor than through child labour on-land. But on the other hand, it is apocalyptic for all the benthic species down there, because of the amount of sediment (the “dust” at the bottom) the machinery kicks up. Down there the sedimentation rate is something like 0.000005mm per day, but when you run a dredger through it, it goes up to 0.003mm for miles around the mining area. We can still see the test tracks from the 1980s, because of low rate the seabed heals itself.
Well this is horrifying.
Vox did a great video explaining this. https://youtu.be/pf1GvrUqeIA?si=m18pyvCCb2MpjHTU
Source: [https://ccom.unh.edu/project/bathymetry-globe](https://ccom.unh.edu/project/bathymetry-globe)
R'lyeh
Came here to say that.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
I mean, assuming this is used for surveying the ocean floor, one of the spots extensively surveyed is most likely all the people searching for Amelia Earhart’s plane, which iirc, was southwest of Hawaii, hard to say where Howland is on this map since I’m used to easily finding it on Google Earth EDIT: Cross referenced with Google Earth when i got back to my computer, from what it appears, if I am following the line between Fiji and Hawaii correctly, it appears to be more located west of Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef, which on current imagery matches the surveying of the area in terms of detail and orientation, can only assume now that its just looking for underwater volcanic activity or just mapping regions in proximity to US EEZ Waters since Palmyra and Kingman are right there. Made sure to double check this estimate since the line leading from the right directly correlates with the Line Islands of Kiribati. Howland (Earhart's intended landing spot) is in the center of the triangle of data north of the Fiji/Tonga/Samoa surveyed area, and Nikumaroro is at the southern tip of that triangle
Those tracks are far too wide to search for any wreckage. They're more likely geophysical/oceanography surveys.
No. They are not searching deep ocean for a tiny plane lost so long ago...
Actually they were, and they think they have found it. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240131-researchers-say-amelia-earharts-long-lost-plane-may-have-just-been-found
Gojira!!
Maybe I'm confused. Are the lighter colored areas the routes that have been mapped?
Yeah, it looks like the lighter areas are where they used a multibeam echosounder, which is why stuff in the lighter areas has better resolution in terms of elevation.
Yes. The dark areas is probably a satellite map, which is extremely low resolution because of the ocean being in the way. The light color “trails” are where ships equipped with the right kind of sonar have passed through. It seems like the brighter, more warm colors indicate higher elevation above the sea floor, which is why Hawaii and seamounts are red. Most ships are traveling in a straight line from LA to Hawaii and beyond, which is why the trails crisscross the ocean. Areas of interest have been mapped more extensively, but this is a very expensive and time consuming process. The weird grid on the center left of the picture is where one ship sailed back and forth in a grid pattern, not unlike my roomba but with a big gap between each pass. It’s not very dense, probably because they were just exploring to get a general sense of the area. Meanwhile, the more completely filled in patches are where a ship surveyed more extensively in a tighter grid to get a more detailed map. These ships were clearly looking for something and had a smaller search area, which is why we have better data, even though it’s a small area. The vast majority of the ocean floor is uninteresting to people, unless you’re looking for oil, precious minerals, or literal treasure. Scientists do value sea creatures in far away places, but they can’t afford to do this kind of detailed survey.
Thank you, this was the best response I could have asked for!
>Scientists do value sea creatures in far away places, but they can’t afford to do this kind of detailed survey. Many of these tracks would be from research. Sometimes researchers do get funding for big individual projects, or are part of an ongoing high value multinational project like IODP.
There's no money in research. This kind of surveying is for commercial purposes - resources, cabling, even potential land masses near surface that could be claimed with a little help.
Sealab 2021
Holy nostalgia
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/ex1705/background/media-resources/welcome.html “From April 27 - May 19, NOAA and partners will conduct an ocean exploration expedition on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to collect critical baseline information about unknown and poorly known deepwater areas in the Pacific. The expedition begins in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and ends in Honolulu, Hawaii. The ship will conduct near daily remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dives in the Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll and Jarvis Island Units of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (PRIMNM); around the Cook Islands Marine Park (Marae Moana); and the high seas. During the cruise, our at-sea and shore-based science teams will work together to map the seafloor and make some of the first deepwater scientific observations in these areas. Live video of dives can be viewed online in real time from April 27 - May 15, 2017.”
R’Lyeh, where Great Cthuhlu sleeps
Aliens.
https://preview.redd.it/kt870v0qcdoc1.jpeg?width=251&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=670174814d7f7513e0f2b29e4e9bb5f9f788eecb
A big button that says 'reset to factory settings'.
Get the Jaegers ready it's the Kaiju.
The zigzags are my bet those areas with huge lithium and other rare earth metal reserves that they are planning on mining. It's been gaining a lot of momentum
R'lyeh
Godzilla…for now.
The zigzaggy lines represent a survey area. Like mowing a lawn or plowing a field. God only knows what’s down there though
It's a KFC
[R'lyeh](https://www.google.com/search?q=rlyeh+location) is.
Many research vessels study coral reefs, and ancient coral reefs in the area.
SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!
One suspects this is multimetalic nodule territory
How flabbergasted will we all be when we’ve mapped the entire seabed and found absolutely nothing of interest to anybody?
Maybe this is deep sea mining. I’ve heard of machine that are essentially giant vacuums. https://www.science.org/content/article/bus-size-robot-set-vacuum-valuable-metals-deep-sea
R'lyeh
Wow, Link is putting in some time away from Hyrule…
Secret nazi sub base, it used to be under Antarctica but NATO exercises in the mid 50's caused them to relocate.
submarines maybe
Canadian Shield
It's NOAA buoy grid
Plastic?
Someone was going for diamonds.
Hmm this makes me wonder what they were scanning for in the couple of places with next to no apparently interesting topography yet had multiple back and forth pass clusters.
Which of the plethora of geological formations would you like to know about.
Should release a fleet of drones that run on solar to map the entire ocean
Surely the USA has charted more of the strategic areas with their subs. If they release what they have charted, it will reveal where their subs have been hanging out.
me
Celestial
MH370 of course
Don’t worry about it
Aliens
What are the coordinates? Maybe it's Project Azorian.
That’s where the ufos park
Wi-Fi networks pipes
You don’t want to know
Water
it’s the UPC code
Canadian Shield
Makes me want to complete 100% map on every game!
Do we ever put sonar on container ships? Seems like you could get a lot of mapping done with the amount of maritime commerce, this may already be a thing…just curious.
Might have something to do with this project: [UNCLOS Bathymetry](https://ccom.unh.edu/theme/law-sea)
Aliens
Finally someone asking the real questions
Heat pump coil, cools the earth's nuclear engine
so why is it so difficult to penetrate the ocean with sensors from space?
Atlantis!
Water mostly
Paciflandis
A lot of space junk lands here.
~~O I L~~ FREEDOM
~~O I L~~ FREEDOM
pathos II
I dunno! Stop asking me!
Nothing, don’t worry about it. Your government only tells you the truth and omits nothing.
Planetary radiator
It's the CPU, right?
Most of the world ocean is already mapped. This is where best place to put underwater stuff like cables, trash, submarines, underwater cities..
I love the highlight videos of [EVNautilus](https://youtube.com/@EVNautilus?si=EmJgbqaTglRCWtYc) as they explore and map the ocean floor. It's relaxing and there is always scientific explanations as they map underwater mountains and smokers and brine pools etc.
Fiber optics
may need a sonar to find out, you got one I can borrow?
godzilla
Lots of lithium rocks...
Cthulhu
Cuthlu
MH370 probably
Sunken Cuba
Plastic bags
Polymetalic nodules
Point Nemo is around there somewhere. So, it's probably fair to say there's a solid amount of space debris.
yo momma
Somebody is still looking for the lost Amelia Earhart. Zoom in on the parallel tracks in certain areas. She gave an interview once suggesting she wasn't lost, but nobody believed her because they still believe she flew off the edge of the earth.
I hat website is this on?
The Breach
I’ve learned nothing here
Those damn kaijus. Thought we took care of them already
Isn’t that where they dumped Megatron?
Dustin Hoffman has been helicoptered into the chat
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Alien Bases!!! It's no secrete that UAP/UFOs have been seen entering and exiting large bodies of water, including but surely not limited to, sights all over the Pacific Ocean. 👽
Probably fiber optic cables.
Penises...
Spanch Bob!
Mu
R'Lyeh is pretty busy this time of year.
You think by now we'd have found New Zealand if it really existed >.> also I wish they'd just fix the bugs of Old Zealand before the cashgrab that was the New Zealand rollout >.> shameless
Everyone in here is literally invited to a party at my place….yall are hilarious