MessageToEagle.com – A digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor has been created for the first time by an international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.
Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic.
The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) for the first time shows the detailed topography of the seafloor for the entire area south of 60°S.
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The IBCSO data grid and the corresponding Antarctic chart will soon be freely available in the internet and are intended to help scientists amongst others to better understand and predict sea currents, geological processes or the behavior of marine life.
“For our IBCSO data grid, scientists from 15 countries and over 30 research institutions brought together their bathymetric data from nautical expeditions. We were ultimately able to work with a data set comprising some 4.2 billion individual values,” explains IBCSO editor Jan Arndt, bathymetric expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven.
Reliable bathymetric data have so far existed for only 17 percent of this area.
The largest data gaps, for example, are in the deep sea regions of the south Indian Ocean and the South Pacific and in areas which experience difficult sea ice conditions throughout the year in some places, such as in the Weddell Sea,” says Arndt.
This work was worth it: the IBCSO data grid has a resolution of 500 times 500 meters- a feature that leads to impressive degree of detail.
Where older models only offer a glimpse of a mountain in the deep sea, IBCSO shows an elevation with sharp ridge crests and deep channels in the slopes.
A formerly flat point at the bottom of the Riiser-Larsen Sea can now be identified as an offshoot, some 300 meters deep, of the underwater Ritscher Canyon which runs along a length of over 100 kilometers from the south west to the north. And not far away from today’s shelf ice edge of the large Getz ice shelf the furrows are to be seen quite clearly which were ploughed into the seafloor by the ice tongue as it grew.
The 3D data grids of the seafloor enable oceanographers to model currents and the movement of the deep Antarctic water which is of such great importance. Geologists are able to recognize the structures of geological processes more easily,” Arndt explained.
One thing is important to remember, however.
Still more than 80 percent of the area of the South Polar Sea is still unchartered.
An article on the subject has now appeared online in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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