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Understanding Google Earth Ocean Floor Data

January 20, 2016

With the recent update to the Google Earth ocean floor data it is worth having a look at some of the patterns we can see and what causes them. In the past, some of the patterns have been mistaken for an alien base or Atlantis. However, most of the stranger patterns are merely an artifact of how the data is collected, processed and combined with other data-sets.


In the area around Hawaii, we can see a lot of streaks and swirls. This is a result of an algorithm used to interpolate the sea floor depth between data points and does not reflect the actual appearance of the sea floor. In the above screen shot there is no depth data for most of the central region of the image where the streaks can be seen.


When zoomed out we can often see tracks (1) of higher resolution data, which are the tracks of ships equipped with sonar that mapped the ocean floor along their route. In many cases they have concentrated on mapping the joints between tectonic plates (2) that are of particular interest to oceanographers and geologists.

The tracks also show us the routes the ships took. In the above image we can see the routes fan out from the southern tip of Tasmania as that is the route that would be taken by any ships coming from the east of Australia. Similar patterns can be seen elsewhere, with a fan shapes around Hawaii, the west coast of the US, Cape Town, South Africa, and a number of other locations. There seems to be a popular destination in southern Chile, but the tracks fade away as they approach the coast, so we weren’t able to identify the exact destination. A lot of the ships also went through the Panama Canal. The tracks are highlighted in a graphic in this article that we looked at on Monday. The ships’ tracks are much less visible near the coasts, most likely because higher resolution data is available for shallower coastal waters.

The global low resolution dataset used for the ocean floor is the Scripps map, which is based on satellite measurements of gravity. Although the map gives us a good idea of the large scale structure of the ocean floor it does not show the details and any given measurement may be quite different from the Scripps map. A single measurement will often stand out as a hill or dimple in the overall map, when in reality it may be an unremarkable point on the ocean floor.


In the above image from a location near Guam, we see an area where there has been a survey done with depth measurements taken at very regular intervals. The pattern is caused by combining those measurements with another lower resolution dataset that has a different average depth, so each measurement appears as a dip or bump.


The same effect as mentioned in the previous image can be seen here, but with fewer data points.

As we have mentioned before Google Earth often shows different ocean floor data depending on how zoomed in you are. This is very noticeable around Hawaii and Guam.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Filed Under: Site News Tagged With: google ocean, Scripps Institution Of Oceanography

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PLEASE NOTE: Google Earth Blog is no longer writing regular posts. As a result, we are not accepting new comments or questions about Google Earth. If you have a question, use the official Google Earth and Maps Forums or the Google Earth Community Forums.

Comments

  1. scrappydoscrappydont says

    March 12, 2016 at 10:19 pm

    So I guess that means that we shouldn’t believe what we see on google. Right? I mean, if any part of what we see , could be a glitch/anomoly/algorythm/etc…..

    • Timothy Whitehead says

      March 13, 2016 at 10:54 am

      Don’t be too ready to believe what you see. Get to understand it first. Certainly with ocean floor data, we can expect it to look almost completely different when we eventually have high resolution maps of all the ocean floors.

      • scrappydoscrappydont says

        March 15, 2016 at 5:32 am

        I agree Timothy, but I have suspected that there will be quite some time before the likes of Google have all the info before releasing it to the public, so that anything we should not see, will be ‘hidden’.

  2. bill goats says

    March 5, 2017 at 4:14 pm

    Explain this one then:
    43°30’00.0″N 130°48’00.0″W

    • Timothy Whitehead says

      March 6, 2017 at 7:15 am

      It looks a ship has gone back and forth surveying the area.



PLEASE NOTE: Google Earth Blog is no longer writing regular posts. As a result, we are not accepting new comments or questions about Google Earth. If you have a question, use the official Google Earth and Maps Forums or the Google Earth Community Forums.

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