I don't deny that having a more accurate survey of the oceans' bottoms would be worthwhile, even if just to have saved one life. But it's not possible to instantly do this. The oceans are so enormous that even if every survey ship bent to the task, it would take years and probably decades to complete.
Many world war two boats were lost when they grounded and couldn't be refloated. This wasn't necessarily due to mistakes, but more to the limitations of the charts and the encouragement given to commanders to be aggressive and take risks.
Submarines in transit typically travel in well known and surveyed lanes. However, I don't know if there is such a strip between Guam and Australia (but my guess is that there is) or whether San Francisco was in it (my guess is that they were or this would have been mentioned after the admiral's mast results were made semipublic). If my two guesses are correct, it still doesn't explain how a large seamount was uncharted in a transit lane (only the phrase "discolored water" shows up on one of the two charts they had onboard).
If it is recent, one would think its creation would have been accompanied by detectable tremors, tidal waves, etc. that would have been noticed.
But who knows. Lots of guessing.
MPA and Ship's Diving Officer
USS San Francisco, 2003-04
Oh, what could you possibly know about submarines.... oh, what's that, diving officer you say... and on the San Francisco itself?
OK, maybe I'll grant that you might know just a touch more about it than someone who's claim to knowledge about submarines comes from old movies.... but only by a little bit! ;^>
Seriously, I agree that "hyper accurate survey maps" (there's one of my sources, "Hunt for Red October") is something for long term survey, likely by ships. However, I think that some of the radar mapping stuff that was proved out on the Shuttle should be able to spot something like a new sea mount in a region that is supposed to be open ocean with 6,000 foot depth. I mean, you don't have to have more than something like 100 meter resolution to get that.
We ought to be able to launch a program to put a radar satellite in orbit in short order, from off the shelf parts, to do that kind of gross survey of all of the oceans and have the survey completed relatively quickly. I think the main reason we haven't done it is international politics. The high res satellite based radars can easily do things like pick out buried missle silos and sensitive bunkers. After all, that was apparently the acknowledged intent of the first such Shuttle mission, the one where they picked out the buried river beds in the Sahara, to tell the Soviets that "we see you," that if we can pick that out we can pick out where they hide their missles.
Well, if we can open up the data and demonstrate that it's relatively low resolution I bet we can convince lots of folks that it's a good idea. Give the UN huggers free and unfettered access to the data stream. It won't show anybody anything we don't want them to see (unless we've got a secret underwater city somewhere we need to hide) and it might just turn up some interesting things.
(P.S. my son's an Aggie with 18 months left and has signed his contract for the Marines - so I guess he'll be butting heads with squids, particularly bubble heads, unless he gets stationed on one of the retasked Ohios, that is)