This new version includes all of the multibeam bathymetry data collected by U.S. The satellite and sounding data are combined with land topography from the NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) to create a global topography and bathymetry grid called SRTM30_PLUS. The two developed the prediction technique in 1994.
Previous versions only derived about 10 percent of their data from ship soundings and the rest from depths predicted by Sandwell and NOAA researcher Walter Smith using satellite gravity measurements. Through several rounds of upgrades, Google Earth now has 15 percent of the seafloor image derived from shipboard soundings at 1-kilometer resolution.
"The Google map now matches the map used in the research community, which makes the Google Earth program much more useful as a tool for planning cruises to uncharted areas," Sandwell added.įor example, the updated, more precise data corrects a grid-like artifact on the seafloor that was misinterpreted in the popular press as evidence of the lost city of Atlantis off the coast of North Africa. "UCSD undergraduate students spent the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders as well as adding all the multibeam echosounder data archived at the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colorado." "The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data," said David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist. Click here to contribute to Google Earth.The newest version of Google Earth includes more accurate imagery in several key areas of ocean using data collected by research cruises over the past three years. Google Earth 5.0 makes it possible to go below sea level and explore global bathymetry, but we're most excited about the inclusion of Census of Marine Life content. The new release upgrades many aspects of how the oceans are displayed. With the release of Google Earth 5.0 in February 2009, the Census of Marine Life has a presence in Google's 3-D modeling project. A world of marine discoveries including 50 different kinds of Arctic jellies, a colossal sea star, and Antarctica’s biggest-ever amphipod and other interesting, rare, and new marine species can be found. Or one can follow along on scientific explorations to the coldest, saltiest water on the planet or to a new ocean environment created by an ice shelf break the size of Jamaica or to the hottest hydrothermal vent ever discovered-hot enough to melt lead! These journeys are but a few of the hundreds of possibilities for learning more about marine life available on the Census of Marine Life layer in Ocean in Google Earth.įor Census Scientists: Contributing to Google Earth Google Earth lets you share the excitement of Census of Marine Life explorations as scientists uncover the mysteries of what lives below the surface of the global ocean. Census waterdrop icons mark the location where researchers have been exploring. Every week the latest Census discoveries are added to Google Earth, the 3-D geographic explorer from Google.