Scientists have mapped 20 percent of the ocean floor

[pesco]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/23/scientists-have-mapped-20-perc.html

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[PsiPhiGrrrl]

This sounds interesting. I just hope the methods aren’t harmful to marine life.

[Mister44]

My dad was doing this during Vietnam around the waters of the area on the USS Tanner.

[Brainspore]

The tricky part is mapping the undersea canyons where the Great Old Ones live (or lie dead and dreaming) since many of those locales exist in more than three dimensions.

[Punchcard]

Oh, I have no doubt that a lot of Navy folks with significant clearance are sitting around saying “That’s cute. Good for them”.

[Peso]

Talk to Ramona. I hear she’s working in London now.

[Mister44]

My dad DID have security clearance back then!

[Mister44]

I made this in illustrator using a blurry photo found on the web. The box in the middle was for campaign ribbons that i put in the one i printed out.

[jandrese]

Tying in pleasure vessel and fishing vessel data recorders looks like it might be a bit useless. Those vessels will tend to stay in areas that are already well mapped, because that’s where people go.

What you really need if you want to get this done is a small fleet of deep sea vessels mapping the vast areas outside of the regular shipping lanes. It’s very expensive and will be hitting areas of the ocean that have seen little to no human presence throughout history.

This could be an interesting engineering exercise on how to achieve the goal with the lowest cost. Maybe a small number of ships with relatively small crews operating a flotilla of GPS guided autonomous drone vessels spread out in a line that can map a relatively wide swath of the ocean floor with each pass.

[capnjimbo]

Hope they find that $5 note that I accidentally left in my shorts pocket when I went swimming that one time in 92, I could use the cash.

[Lanthade]

Looks like they’ve done the easy work. It’s probably going to get exponentially harder the more they do.

[MrHarley]

The IHO DCDB Data Viewer shows the global coverage of the DCDB’s bathymetric data holdings as well as the spatial extent of data archived at other repositories via web services.