Images Reveal Diverse Seafloors off U.S. Coast Images Reveal Diverse Seafloors off U.S. Coast Scientists at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have unveiled images from the most extensive, highly detailed mapping ever done of the seafloor off the United States coast. The new images reveal the surprisingly different appearances of the seafloor off Oregon, California, Louisiana, Florida and New Jersey and Maryland, and they allowed the first detailed comparison of different parts of the U.S. continental slope. N.Y. Their research and pictures were published in the January issue of Geology . The scientists analyzed an unprecedented collection of ocean-bottom depths measured by ships that record sound echoes from the seafloor. The data provide much more direct, detailed and accurate information on what the ocean floor looks like than seafloor maps based on satellite measurements, such as the one recently unveiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Haxby said.
Satellites can only resolve features larger than five square miles.
Sophisticated instruments aboard modern research ships can resolve features 5,000 times smaller, though it would take many hundreds of years by ship to map all the worlds oceans, he said. The detailed bathymetric data were gathered in the mid-1980's to early 1990's by NOAA and during scientific cruises funded by the National Science Foundation. The NOAA surveys in particular are the largest and most detailed surveys of the U.S. continental margin ever made. They were commissioned after the Reagan Administration declared a 200-mile band of U.S. coastal waters off limits to exploitation by foreign fishing and mining interests in 1983. Colo. The Columbia scientists were the first to analyze the full NOAA and NSF-funded data sets, transforming them into exquisite images that provide a new perspective of the seafloor off the U.S. coast, Pratson said.