In its first year of operation, NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Satellite has mapped Earth’s mysterious seafloors in greater detail than satellites for more than 30 years.
As reported by space The SWOT mission has achieved a lot in its first full year of operation, and scientists are already producing unprecedented new work using SWOT’s robust dataset, including researchers Yao Yu, David T. Sandwell, and Gerald DeBarbour who “published”Abyssal Marine Tectonics from the SWOT Mission” In Science Last month.
Yu, Sandwell and DeBarbour found underwater mountains and volcanoes undetected by older satellites. The team used a year’s worth of SWOT data to “transform what looked like blurry blobs into clear seamounts, ridges and troughs,” explains the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. (https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/swot-sharpens-seafloor-focus)
“In this gravity map made from just one year of SWOT data, we can see individual abyssal hills as well as thousands of smaller unknown seamounts and previously hidden tectonic structures buried beneath sediment and ice,” says Yu. “This map will help us answer some fundamental questions in tectonics and deep ocean mixing.”
SWOT includes a variety of instruments that can detect subtle changes in ocean circulation by measuring sea surface topography. By measuring these changes, SWOT can measure the internal waves of the ocean, just as various medical imaging devices can see inside the body. The gravitational influence of large underwater structures, such as volcanoes, influences the way ocean water collects and moves. Scientists can use these differences in sea surface height to gather information about what lies beneath the water’s surface.
Although not as detailed in resolution as ship-borne instruments, these ship-borne instruments have so far been able to survey only about a quarter of the ocean floor. Data on the remaining 75% of the ocean floor – the global ocean covers 71% of the Earth – comes indirectly through satellite measurements.
“The mission, still underway, promises important insights for SWOT bathymetric charting, tectonic plate reconstruction, underwater navigation and deep-sea mixing,” the researchers reported.
So far, his research has focused on abyssal hills, seamounts, and continental margins (the transitional zone between continental and oceanic crust). Abyssal hills are an interesting subject, because these parallel ranges formed by the movements of tectonic plates are usually 50 to 300 meters high, which is not that large. With earlier satellites, it was difficult to detect sea surface differences caused by such objects, but SWOT can.
SWOT is a joint effort between NASA and the Center National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France.
Image Credit: The featured image is a screenshot NASA SWOT Video With data obtained from PO.DAAC.
