Gravity’s Magic: New Seafloor Map Shows Earth’s Uncharted Depths

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Gravity’s Magic: New Seafloor Map Shows Earth’s Uncharted Depths

Gravity’s Magic: New Seafloor Map Shows Earth’s Uncharted Depths:

An October 2014 gravity map of the Earth’s oceans using data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission and the CNES-NASA Jason-1 satellite. Findings include “continental connections” between South American and Africa, and evidence of seafloor spreading in the Gulf of Mexico that took place 150 million years ago. The red dots are volcanoes. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Volcanoes! Seafloor spreading! Hidden ridges and mountains! These are the wonders being revealed in new maps of Earth’s sea floor. And no, it didn’t require a deep-sea dive to get there. Instead we got this information from a clever use of gravity (combining the data of two satellites making measurements from orbit.)

The data has caught the attention of Google, which plans to use this data for its upcoming ocean maps release. Scientists also say the information will tell us more about the 80% of the ocean floor that is either unexamined or obscured by thick sand.

So here’s where the data came from. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography combined information from two satellites — the European Space Agency’s ongoing CryoSat mission and the now defunct Jason-1 satellite from NASA and the French space agency CNES, which was decommissioned in 2013 after nearly 12 years of operations.

CryoSat is designed to map the thickness of ice using a radar altimeter (which is a clue to the effects of climate change). But this altimeter can be used all over the world, including to look at how high the sea floor is. Jason-1, for its part, was told to look at the Earth’s gravity field in the last year of its mission. And what a world pops out when this data is used.

A 2014 view of the Earth’s sea floor using data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission and the CNES-NASA Jason-1 satellite. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

“The effect of the slight increase in gravity caused by the mass of rock in an undersea mountain is to attract a mound of water several meters high over the seamount. Deep ocean trenches have the reverse effect,” ESA wrote in a statement. “These features can only be detected by using radar altimetry from space.”

Some of the new findings include finding new bridges between Africa and South America and uncovering seafloor spreading that happened in the Gulf of Mexico 150 million years ago. Results based on the study, led by Scripps’ David Sandwell, recently appeared in the journal Science.

Long-time readers of Universe Today may also recall a gravity map from ESA’s Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), which revealed Earth’s gravity as a lumpy potato shape in 2011.

Source: European Space Agency

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

UFO SIGHTINGS PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

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Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Sunday, October 19, 2014