NASA’s SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite revealed the details of the world oceans that have never been seen before. The satellite mapped more than 100,000 unknown mountains and hills in the sea base using millimeter height changes on the ocean surface.
New discoveries help to understand the structure of deep sea ecosystems and shed light on the geological past of the Earth. This development can deliver scientists to the full map of the ocean base dozens of years before the results that can be achieved with Sonar technology.
It is less known than the moon surface
According to Scitechdaily; The scientific world has mapped the surface of the Moon in more detail from the Earth’s ocean base. However, the SWOT satellite, a joint project of NASA and French space agency CNES, began to change this.
Correct map of the ocean base; It is critical in many areas, from safe marine transportation to laying communication cables, deep sea flows from plates tectonics. Geological structures such as Sea Mountains (Seamount) and Abissal Hills, affecting the heat and nutrient flow in the deep oceans, shaping the living spaces of marine creatures.
High precision from satellite data
The SWOT satellite can scan about 90 percent of the earth every 21 days. Satellite can detect changes that find a few centimeters on the sea surface and detect the underlying structures under these differences. The geophysicist David Sandwell and his team mapped in detail the mountainous areas under the sea using one -year swot data.
The purple color on the map shows the collapse of the sea base and the green mountainous areas with higher mass.
Previously unknown structures emerged
Previous satellite observations were able to detect large mountains of only 1 kilometer high. Thanks to SWOT, this limit went down to 500 meters. Thus, the number of known submarine mountains increased from 44 thousand to 100 thousand.
These mountainous structures intensify nutrients by directing deep sea currents and contribute to the increase in biodiversity. They form “living oasis ında on the ocean soles that look naked.
Abissal hills were also observed
Researcher Yao Yu from the Scripps Occupational Institute, SWOT, not only the mountains, but also a few kilometers wide abissal hills can observe in detail, he said.
These hills occur in parallel strips such as laundry board in areas where tectonic plates are separated. The direction and distribution of these structures offers important clues about how continents have moved in the past.
2030 target can be caught earlier
Researchers say that they have removed most of the existing information obtained from SWOT data, and now they focus on calculating the depth of these structures. This study will contribute to the target of mapping the entire ocean base by Sonar until 2030.
“Even if we do not fully achieve this goal, a significant part of SWOT will be completed, Dav said geophysicist David Sandwell.
