Snip.... Viewers can use the “ground level view” feature of Google Earth to take them to the seafloor for a closer look at the terrain. To find which areas offer more detail, users can download a plug-in, the Columbia Ocean Terrain Synthesis. This provides an extra layer to the conventional Google Earth imagery, showing the tracks of research cruises that have produced the higher resolution. (For those who really want to dive in, there is information on the cruises themselves, and even the original bathymetry data.) Snip....
"The imagery is the result of hundreds of cruises by scientific research vessels from many institutions, traveling roughly three million miles across the oceans over the past two decades. To create the new maps, the team combined multi-beam sonar measurements into Lamont-Doherty’s Global Multi-Resolution Topography system. This same database feeds the recently released EarthObserver, Lamont’s global scientific mapping application for iPads and other mobile devices. The team began the ocean synthesis in the early 2000s, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The project is ongoing, with the continual addition of new data. While most of the data assembled so far has come from U.S. institutions, many foreign institutions hold troves of mapping data, which the team hopes to tap in the future." ...snip...
"Bottom line: Google Earth released a new feature on June 8, 2011 – World Oceans Day – that shows five percent of the ocean’s floors with a resolution of about 100 meters (109 yards). Oceanographers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory synthesized the imagery from scientific data collected on research cruises."
Good Hunting!
ThankQ! Only 5% has been mapped. What a wondrous world we have!