Around the Pier: Google Earth Ocean Terrain Receives Major Update

Data from Scripps, NOAA sharpen resolution of seafloor maps; Atlantis vanishes – again

This week, the world can see a little more of its own surface thanks to an update of the ocean terrain layer in Google Earth.

The update added new seafloor data derived from ship-based soundings and corrected data from previous versions that at least in one case had led to a misguided “discovery.”  The street grid of what a few took to be the lost city of Atlantis has disappeared after bathymetric data was corrected.

“The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data,” said David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist.  “UCSD undergraduate students spent the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders as well as adding all the multibeam echosounder data archived at the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.”

“The Google map now matches the map used in the research community, which makes the Google Earth program much more useful as a tool for planning cruises to uncharted areas,” Sandwell added.

Google produced a video tour of the update. Watch it here: