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Google Working On Mapping Ocean

To see if there really is a hole in the bottom of the sea

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"There is no real terrain or depth model for the ocean in Google Earth," Tim Haverland, a geospatial application developer at the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told News.com "You can’t get in a submarine and in essence fly through the water and explore ocean canyons yet."

Google Ocean will have a basic layer that shows the depth of the sea floor and will act as a spatial framework for more data. Google has plans to have some areas of the map in high-resolution images.

Other data will be visible as overlying layers that show weather patterns, currents, temperatures, shipwrecks and coral reefs.

"Google will basically just provide the field and then everyone will come flocking to it," predicted Stephen P. Miller, head of the Geological Data Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "There will be peer pressure to encourage people to get their data out there."

Google is likely to use high-resolution grids from oceanographic institutions showing the depth of certain areas. The data from those grids, cover a small portion of the sea floor, are based on ships using mulitbeam sonar. The sonar helps to calculate the depth of the sea floor based on bumps and dips in the ocean’s surface.

"We hope that one of the outcomes of Google Ocean will be an understanding of how much remains to be explored," said Miller of Scripps.

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There are 13 Comments. Add Yours.
  1. Uhh, Google already has a project codenamed Project Ocean – its for their ambitious scan every book and provide it online…so would have been good to mention that!

  2. 0 0
    kathy kay

    love to see what i could never see ,when going to the sea

  3. Anotehr useless venture that makes no sense and is a waste of money.

  4. I have no idea as to the point of this. Half the world is hungry and they pour billions into seafloor research.

  5. I don’t understand the point of this; couldn’t they put the money towards much more useful things?

  6. I think the idea of mapping the Ocean floor is very cool. One can only hope that we work to preserve the artifacts and life forms that we find as we encounter new things and not decimate that as we have in the past.

  7. 0 0

    I’m not sure what use this information is, but if they’ve got the time and money, why not?

  8. Wow, Google is at it again. Google Earth, Google Sky, now Google Ocean. Whats next google future? I wouldn’t mind a google past to look at areas before any major developments.  Keep it up google

  9. This will be awesome.  Google Ocean.  Wow.  I guess it is indeed all about content.

  10. 0 0

     Instead of mapping the oceans, I’d like to see Google updating the satellit images in Google Earth. Those of the area where I live (just outside Guardamar del Segura in the south-east of Spain) are so out of date that only a few of the houses on the urbanization are shown. In fact, the urbanization is complete, and has been for some years, with over a thousand houses.

  11. A few weeks ago, we saw a video of Google wanting to set up camp on Mars. Now we got the ocean. Sounds like a winner.

  12. 0 0

    Google sometime baffles me. They seems to be involve in everything that is in this universe.


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