#The specific claim is 'the bottom of the ocean is less well mapped than mars' | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

maeamian · 2 years ago

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About to go insane trying to find sources for this, but starting to develop a theory that the idea that the bottom of the ocean is totally unknown is pretty outdated, but is an extremely compelling factoid and as such has persisted longer than it is true.

#The main source for this claim on wikipedia is from '99 #And the amount we know about things has incresed somewhat since then #And significantly for me personally but a lot of that was catching up #Many satellites exist explicitly for the purpose of monitoring and knowing more about the ocean #And like there's some projects that are currently working on the exact problem of detailed seafloor mapping #But none of them are willing to tell me the resolution they're using nor the other more technical details that I could use to sort this #And by 'willing to tell me' I mean can be found by me on their websites #The specific claim is 'the bottom of the ocean is less well mapped than mars'#and that's also very complicated because both areas of knowledge have substanatially increased in the past 20 years #TBF it's not implausible either #I read a paper from the 70s saying that we knew more about moon rocks than any given earth rock too #I just would like a more recent source on this in either direction and all I can find is marketing materials #ETA: Having found what I could I think 'we have higher resolution topography of mars than the ocean' is true #But more because we've been doing a really fucking impressive job mapping mars #We've also been mapping the ocean pretty well but due to the technical details it is to a lower resolution than mars maps #They're looking to improve the ocean-bottom resolution but it's already pretty okay #Which is a far cry from 'totally unknown'#It's not as good as the martian ones that's true but it isn't really in the territory of 'total mystery' anymore

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