Nothing makes my little heart go pitter-patter like a new data set. And the new General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) does not disappoint. Let’s go geek out over some data, shall we?

What exactly is GEBCO? It’s a giant, high-resolution map of the ocean seafloor (with some topography thrown in to make land feel better about itself). This whole thing was the brain child of His Serene Highness Prince Albert I of Monaco, who in 1903 decided we needed to map the oceans. I was amazed to learn that up until the early 1990’s these maps were still drawn by hand! Then we realized that computers were actually pretty good at mapping too and first digitized maps came out in 1994, in a handy-dandy set of CD-ROM of course.

But now GEBCO’s all digital and ready to be downloaded at the click of a button from the interwebs. It’s been 6 years since the last update and this one is awesome. The fine folks at GEBCO channeled the data curating acumen of a million librarians to create this bathymetric pièce de résistance. New data sets were added (the Coast of Chile is looking mighty fine if I do say so). Metadata was added (the data that explains the data. Did you use a fancy acoustic system or a rock tied to a rope to get that depth?). They even got classified data from the U.S…..SHHHHH.

And then they did lots of basic statistics. ‘Cause you had better flaunt those stats when you got ’em. The mean depth of the ocean? It’s 3897 m (2.4 miles). Where is 50% of the earth’s surface? Below 3200 m (2 miles). What’s the percentage of the earth covered by water? 71%. But my favorite statistic has to be this one:

~900 ship-years of surveying would be needed to obtain complete multibeam coverage of the world’s oceans.

YES PEOPLE. 900 years. In an ultimate show of carthographic geekery *SWOON*, they even figured out it would take 300 years to map the deep ocean and another 600 to map the shallow water near the coast. But that’s actually not that bad considering there are over 700 high-resolution multibeam mapping systems out there ready to be deployed at any moment. We’ll probably get there sooner than 2915. Although they’ll probably need more than 2 CD-ROMS after mowing the ocean seafloor for all the data….

It’s time people. Time to upgrade that bathymetry. And you can find it all at http://www.gebco.net/ I know that’s what I’m doing this evening.

REFERENCES:

Carpine-Lancre, Jacqueline, et al. “The history of GEBCO 1903-2003: the 100-year story of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.” (2003).

Weatherall, P., K. M. Marks, M. Jakobsson, T. Schmitt, S. Tani, J.-E. Arndt, M. Rovere, D. Chayes, V. Ferrini, and R. Wigley (2015), A New Digital Bathymetric Model of the World’s Oceans, Earth and Space Science, 2, doi:10.1002/2015EA000107.

The post It’s time to geek out over a new global bathymetric data set first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This is not the ocean:

Indeed, even THIS is not the ocean:

Before you start thinking that the folks at DSN are losing their marbles, bear with me!  The truth is that none of these three all-too-familiar and quintessentially marine images reflects the actual reality of what most of the ocean is like.  Here’s why.  At their most basic, the above three images can be represented like this (respectively):

Our experience of the ocean is almost entirely defined by our interactions along its margins: along the coast, sitting the bottom or floating on the surface.  More often, it’s some combination of these, like a coral reef, which can be all three: coastal, benthic and also in reach of or transcending the surface at least some of the time.  In all of these marginal habitats, life is heavily influenced by the margin itself: benthic things have specific adaptations to interacting with the substrate, while pelagic things have adaptations for interacting with the surface, and so on.  In many of these places it’s sunny, it’s warm and there are lots of animals, at least relatively speaking.   The point of my post is that the rest of the ocean, an overwhelming majority in fact, looks like this:

That’s because the part of the oceans not included in coastal zones, on the bottom, or within sunlight’s reach of the surface make’s up about 94% of the volume of the ocean (and of course, the other 6% looks like this at night time, or 50% of the time!).  Average ocean depth is around 12,100 feet, with sunlight penetrating the top 650 feet or so.  The other 11,450 feet consists of pitch dark and perpetual blackness, with no margin or structure to disrupt the inky 3-dimensional void.  It’s also uniformly and numbingly cold; below the reach of sunlight it is about 4°C or 39°F everywhere in the world, regardless of whether you are off Greenland or Hawaii.  About the only thing that isn’t uniform throughout this habitat is pressure, which varies greatly with the depth of any given cube of water, but is generally a great deal more than any experienced along coasts or at the surface, although it must be said that bottom-dwelling communities in the deepest parts of the ocean experience the greatest pressures of all.

There are animals in the void too, of course, but they are sparse in the extreme and without extrinsic light and without any habitat structures they are foreign in form.  Often delicate and flimsy, diaphanous or gelatinous, they exist in a world without walls, floor or ceiling, without any structure at all to define the boundaries of their environment or even to serve as some spatial point of reference.  There are animals here that will not during their lifetime experience a solid surface, or even a fluid one such as the boundary where water meets air; they and their ancestors appear and disappear from the void, never alighting on anything.  To them, a wall might be as incomprehensible as a black hole is to us.  They are born, live out their life histories and die in a frigid, timeless, structureless void.

I’m not a religious guy, but the bible opens with a statement to the effect that “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep” and I can’t help but be struck that the world described by this passage, before God supposedly created light and began to shape the world, bears a striking resemblance to the vast majority of the oceans that exist today.  We think we know the oceans, but we don’t, not really, because the majority of the oceans are an icy black void inhabited by creatures as alien as any we can expect to find in that other unceasing void, the one we call space.

The post We don't know the ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

xkcd yesterday brought one of the spectacular pieces of illustration ever seen on the internet, Lakes and Oceans.  This glorious piece of art features depths of the world’s lakes and oceans as well as the homes of David Bowie and Freddy Mercury.  Some of the xkcd illustrations and cartoons make it too posters.  Well Jarrett Byrnes and I have decided we want posters. And we know you want them too.  So DSN is starting a write-in campaign to orders@xkcd.com

Thanks to the many people who brought this too my attention including Roy Plotnick and Chris Shields.

The post Must Own a Poster of This first appeared on Deep Sea News.