A new map of the ocean floor is the clearest humankind has ever had, and its extensive chart of underwater mountains — called seamounts — is helping scientists better understand the movement of the continents.
According to National Geographic, the new map, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, was compiled from data gathered by the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 and NASA's Jason-1 satellites.
Both satellites are used in a science known as altimetry, the practice of measuring sea surface height from space by bouncing radar signals off the oceans.
According to a release accompanying the study, the new map is twice as accurate as the previous version produced nearly 20 years ago.
"This capability will allow us to revisit unsolved questions and to pinpoint where to focus future exploratory work," said Don Rice, program director in the National Science Foundation, which funded the research.
The map provides a solid new foundation for future versions of Google's ocean maps, filling in ocean depth profiles more accurately and completely.
"One of the most important uses will be to improve the estimates of seafloor depth in the 80 percent of the oceans that remain uncharted or [where the sea floor] is buried beneath thick sediment," the authors wrote in the study.
Among the new information the map exposed was a new connection across South America and Africa, and seafloor spreading ridges in the Gulf of Mexico that died out over a 100 million years ago.
For the most part, however, "The kinds of things you can see very clearly are the abyssal hills, the most common landform on the planet," said David Sandwell, lead author of the paper.
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