Google Earth celebrated the three year anniversary of its ocean floor map feature with a massive update of the data used to generate its undersea maps. The new update, according to Google, is based on data collected from more than 8000 ocean voyages from 135 different organizations such as the US Navy, NOAA, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The new data corrects a multitude of errors that existed in the original ocean floor mapping data sets, says a statement from the University of California, San Diego released through NewsWise. For example, when the ocean floor map was first released, an article by UK tabloid The Sun suggested that one particular feature, an apparently man-made series of straight lines laid out in a grid, might be evidence of the lost city of Atlantis. Google was quick to deny the discovery of Atlantis, as were some of the entities that supplied the ocean depth data used to create the maps.
NOAA issued a statement explaining that the lines represented areas of very high data resolution overlaid over broader maps of lower resolution. The straight lines represented detailed measurements directly along the path of research vessels as they criss-crossed a particular section of the ocean. These patterns were not the streets of a sunken city, and, indeed, if someone were to view that area of the ocean floor, they would see nothing resembling straight lines or grids at all since it was merely an illusion created by inconsistent data collection methods.
Today, thanks in large part to the efforts of UC, San Diego undergraduate students, errors like those that led to the supposed “Atlantis” discovery have been meticulously identified and corrected. At the time of its release three years ago, the sea floor map had accurate depth soundings for only 10 percent of the ocean. With the new release, that is improved to 15 percent. The balance is derived from satellite data.
Another update will be released later this year, according to the UC, San Diego release, using a new set of satellite data collected by CryoSat, a European Space Agency which collects highly detailed gravity measurements more than twice as accurate as those used to create Google’s current sea floor map.
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