A new satellite has mapped Earth’s ocean floor in unprecedented detail, a new study shows. .
NASA’s first year of measurements Surface water and ocean topography (SWOT) The satellite mission, launched in December 2022, will be launched by NASA and the French National Center for Space Research, allowing researchers to study the boundaries between continents and identify underwater hills and volcanoes that earlier satellites could not detect.
“Discovering these characteristics will really advance science, including constructing theories,” study co-author Yao Yua physical geographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography told Live Science. The findings could provide new information about ocean currents, nutrient transport in seawater and the geological history of Earth’s oceans.
With a resolution of 5 miles (8 kilometers) and a 21-day path covering most of the Earth, SWOT data from just one year can provide a clearer picture than 30 years of data collected by ships and older satellites, the researchers said. Understand the situation on the seabed, said in the magazine on December 12 science.
To discover underwater features, SWOT measures the height of the ocean surface. So, despite appearances, the surface is not flat. The gravitational pull of underwater structures such as hills and volcanoes causes water to accumulate in scattered clumps on top of these structures. Thus, changes in sea surface height reveal conditions deep below the surface.
The team focused on three types of underwater features: abyssal hills, small seamounts and continental margins. The Abyssal Hills—parallel ridges just a few hundred feet high—are made of tectonic plates. The team used SWOT data to map individual hills and found where some of the ridges changed direction, suggesting that at some point in Earth’s history the tectonic plates that formed them changed the direction of their movement.
“I was very surprised by these deep-sea hills,” Yu said, because the researchers didn’t expect to see so many hills in such a short period of time.
Yu and her colleagues also studied seamounts, or underwater volcanoes, which influence ocean currents and often become hotspots of biodiversity. older satellite Large seamounts were mapped, but the team found thousands of smaller, previously unknown seamounts less than 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) tall in the SWOT data.
The data helped the team further refine maps of tectonic boundaries and ocean currents near coastal areas. “We are very interested [continental margins] Because ocean currents and tides will bring nutrients and sediments from land into the ocean, affecting the biodiversity and ecology of coastal areas.
for the remainder of its time Planning a three-year scientific missionSWOT will continue to collect ocean current data, map the seafloor and assess global freshwater availability year-round.