March, the NOAA has posted a superb animated digital mapping ocean bottom. A few thousand feet below our keel, this fantastic landscape leaves you dreaming. I can not help you to relay it with translation of their related comment.
TheOcean, it is the most prominent feature on Earth, and of immeasurable importance to life on the planet. But what would it look like if all the water disappeared ? Mountains and valleys dwarfing Everest, Shifting plates and submarine volcanoes, Waves, of the plains. Though ships have mapped only a small portion of the ocean floor, Satellites could be used to generate incredibly detailed maps of the ocean's relief. By sensing the minute gravitational changes that pull, push, and bulge the ocean surface, the bottom's shape can be inferred from space. These bathymetric maps reveal the incredibly dynamic terrain of the ocean. Where available, ship-based measurements are included to provide even higher detail.
This animation offers a tour of the gently sloping oceanic continental shelf deep in the trenches from data analyzed and archived by NOAA. Does it look familiar ? This is in fact the same data that Google has integrated into Google Earth & Ocean.
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Source : NOAA, translated from the English by Francis Fustier