We often hear more is known about features on Mars or the icy surface of Titan than we know about the bottom of our own oceans. That might be a slight exaggeration—but not by much! Roughly 90 percent of the ocean floor remains wholly unmapped or poorly resolved. This week, some of those heretofore mysterious seascapes came into much better focus when two workhorse satellites, Jason-1 and CryoSat-2, phoned home to the Scripps Institute with
loads of new data:
Among the new features they’re now able to detect, Sandwell says, are thousands of previously unknown seamounts between 1000 and 2000 meters tall dotting the ocean floor. They also discovered an 800-kilometer-long now-extinct (i.e., no longer actively spreading) ridge in the South Atlantic Ocean that formed after Africa and North America rifted apart. The team also reports the exact location of a now-extinct seafloor spreading ridge, a zone where two tectonic plates began pulling apart 180 million years ago to form the deep basin that became the Gulf of Mexico. “That was a surprise to me—you’d think everyone would know everything about the Gulf because it’s so well-studied,” he says. “Of course, people knew it opened from seafloor spreading, but they didn’t know exactly where the ridge and transform faults were.” Those features were so deeply buried by sediment that the gravity signals were extremely faint.
- Speaking of the cloud covered surface of Titan, largest moon of lovely, ringed Saturn, there is a bonafide mystery feature that's been spotted coming and going by Cassini's sharp eye and it has planetary astronomers greatly intrigued.
- On behalf of some good friends from the great Pacific Northwest, enjoying the Austin City Limits Music Festival this week, a sweet time lapse series of mist sweeping into Seattle, Washington. Oh, yeah: some other friends from Nebraska aren't that impressed!
- A dismal reminder of our current level of political-scientific discourse on climate science:
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA): "At what point, at what level of CO2 does CO2 become damaging? At what level does it become harmful to human beings?"
Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren: "We are not interested in CO2 levels because of their direct effect on human health, but because of their effect on the world's climate."
My dear Dr. Holdren, you are too kind. I might have suggested those wallowing happily in willful ignorance, feigning curiosity about the direct impact CO2 has on human physiology, might try conducting their next "hearing" with plastic bags fixed firmly over their big fat empty heads.