30.06.2022, 19:59
Schon irgendwo spannend - vermutlich kennen wir mittlerweile die Mondoberfläche besser als die Tiefen der Weltmeere unseres Planeten...
Schneemann
Zitat:Nearly a quarter of Earth's seafloor now mappedhttps://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61986359
Slowly but surely the proportion of the global ocean floor that's been properly mapped is rising. It's now up to just shy of a quarter of the total area under water - at 23.4%.
Better seafloor maps help us with navigation and conservation, among many other uses. Some 10 million sq km (3.8 million sq miles) of new bathymetric (depth) data was added in the past year. This is an area broadly equivalent to the land surface of Europe. The update was given at the second UN Ocean Conference, taking place this week in Lisbon, Portugal. [...]
It's thought a further 10-15% is still squirrelled away on servers, in part because the owners worry they might be giving away commercial or defence secrets if they release the information. "But they really needn't worry," said Jamie McMichael-Phillips, director of Seabed 2030, the organisation that is trying to corral world efforts to obtain a complete picture of Earth's ocean bottom. [...]
Sea maps are essential for safe navigation, obviously, but also for fisheries management and conservation. Marine wildlife tends to congregate around the underwater mountains. Each seamount is a biodiversity hotspot. In addition, the rugged seafloor influences the behaviour of ocean currents and the vertical mixing of water. This is information required to improve the models that forecast future climate change - because it is the oceans that play a pivotal role in moving heat around the planet.
At the moment, our knowledge of just over three-quarters of the planet's underwater terrain comes only from low-resolution satellite measurements that have inferred the presence of tall seamounts and deep valleys from the gravitational influence these features have on the sea surface. Water piles up over the mass of a large submarine mountain and dips slightly where there is a trench.
Schneemann