Comments on: Sea-Floor Sunday #39: Improved bathymetry data in Google Earth!

By: David Sandwell

David Sandwell — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:56:59 +0000

Overlays of updated Google Earth bathymetry can be displayed using the following kmz-file. These overlays show two things not available in the original Google presentation: 1) depth contours are shown at 500 m intervals with a more prominent contour at 2000 m depth; 2) the locations of the raw ship soundings are shown so the user can discriminate measured depth from predicted depth. Finally the comments in the kmz-file provide links to the full documentation for this grid. If this information was available from Google, the Atlantis fiasco may never have occurred.

ftp://topex.ucsd.edu/pub/global_topo_1min/global_topo_1min_V12.1.kmz

Note that this overlay has additional data as well as a number of blunders fixed.

David T. Sandwell
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

(This research is funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.)

By: Ali

Ali — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:28:23 +0000

How i get information about the resolution of google earth datah

By: BrianR

BrianR — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:25:29 +0000

Kiwi Kim … that is a nice image, very cool.

David … I’m traveling at the moment, but thanks for the link, I’m definitely going to check it out.

By: David Sandwell

David Sandwell — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:22:10 +0000

It is good to see Google Earth moving into the ocean. The deep ocean data come from a project called SRTM30_PLUS. Here is the web address. http://topex.ucsd.edu/WWW_html/srtm30_plus.html.
The site includes a place to comment on the data quality; negative comments are the most valuable. These comments will help us to improve the bathymetry for the next version. Actually Google is one version behind since they have V4.0 and the latest version published in September is V5.0 so a number of things have been fixed.

To confirm the source of this grid fly to the location N0 E94.75 to observe the initials DTS/SIO.

David T. Sandwell
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

By: Kiwi Kim

Kiwi Kim — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:28:12 +0000

Great to see New Zealand in that 1st shot :-)

The detail is good in some areas but not so great in others. I can however see the rough outline of my favorate canyon systems on the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand.

Below is the address of a swath bathymery image of the area prepared by New Zealands National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), Brian, I thought you might like this one :-)

http://i415.photobucket.com/albums/pp238/K-W-E-L/Figure3.jpg

By: mesitto

mesitto — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:17:25 +0000

Thanks for tipping me off to this! It will help in some ways for my regional tectonics class. For instance, in studying the late Archean and Proterozoic it helped me visualize the Banda arc as a modern day analog for the possible arc associated with the Cheyenne Suture in southern Wyoming (Jessup et al., 2005).

By: Google Earth - improved ocean floor « The GeoChristian

Google Earth - improved ocean floor « The GeoChristian — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:49:55 +0000

[...] HT: Clastic Detritus [...]

By: BrianR

BrianR — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:09:37 +0000

Yeah, I agree … getting higher-res images for research or other specific reasons can be done with other tools, but this is a great step forward in a all-in-one global mapping tool.

By: Kim

Kim — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 14:47:37 +0000

This is great! Even just the imagery is going to make Google Earth even more useful to get students thinking about tectonics…

By: Silver Fox

Silver Fox — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 14:14:59 +0000

That does make for some nice (and easy to get) pictures of the sea floor!