What's New in the Ocean in Google Earth and Maps

Abstract:

Jenifer Austin, Jamie Adams, Kurt Schwehr, Brian Sullivan, David Sandwell², Walter Smith³, Vicki Ferrini⁴, and Barry Eakins^5, 

1 Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California, USA 

2 University of California-San Diego, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, California ,USA

3 NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry, College Park, Maryland, USA

4 Lamont Doherty, Columbia University

5 NOAA

More than two-thirds of Earth is covered by oceans. On the almost 6 year anniversary of launching an explorable ocean seafloor in Google Earth and Maps, we updated our global underwater terrain dataset in partnership with Lamont-Doherty at Columbia, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and NOAA. With this update to our ocean map, we’ll reveal an additional 2% of the ocean in high resolution representing 2 years of work by Columbia, pulling in data from numerous institutions including the Campeche Escarpment in the Gulf of Mexico in partnership with Charlie Paul at MBARI and the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD has curated 30 years of data from more than 8,000 ship cruises and 135 different institutions to reveal 15 percent of the seafloor at 1 km resolution. In addition, explore new data from an automated pipeline built to make updates to our Ocean Map more scalable in partnership with NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (link to http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/bathymetry/) and the University of Colorado CIRES program (link to http://cires.colorado.edu/index.html).