
The First Complete Map of the Ocean Floor Is Stirring Controversial Waters - Mz
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/first-complete-map-ocean-floor-stirring-controversial-waters-180963993/?no-ist
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ptxd
I have actually worked in bathymetric survey projects in 4 different
continents, and I can tell you there is a good reason why the ocean floor
hasnt been mapped yet.

For one its cost. A single survey ship (their rates are cheap now due to low
oil prices), cost about USD30000 a day, A single ROV (>5k a day), ROV crew,
divers, backup ROV(yes there needs to be 2 ROV's) why? one needs to recover
the other in deepwater, ships crew, the survey crew etc... all usually comes
to about 50k-70k a day in cost (and this is being really conservative). I am
not including cost of bunkering (refueling the ship), crew transport to
location, rotations, food, water, waste disposal etc and the list goes on. If
you take USD100000 a day at an average of 60miles a day in length and probably
a mile width, USD18.5 mil would probably not cover much of a distance. Dont
forget the cost of processors to process the multibeam data (yes multibeam
provides higher resolution because it collects more data points), the mappers-
charters, engineers etc...etc. Just the cost alone is enough to put most
people off. There is a reason why MH370 couldnt be found, and the cost was
enormous that they had to call of the search.

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ge96
This is insane $30K a day just for a boat?! Wow

You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out there
and have it surface and beam back images by satellite. Sphere designs. Haha
just a ball that sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

What about sea floor changes how long would these maps be valid for? Anyway
that's crazy.

Won't be deploying my gold-finding crabs anytime soon.

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cr1895
>This is insane $30K a day just for a boat?! Wow

Specialized vessels (e.g. heavy crane ships, pipelay) can cost 250k-500k per
day. A smaller survey vessel will obviously be much cheaper, but there's crew
to pay, operating costs, specialized labor costs (ROV engineers, scientists),
logistics, fuel, etc. It all adds up.

>You'd think with "drone technology" you could just send these things out
there

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that aren't tethered to a ship are in
wide use. However, you still need a ship to deploy, maintain, etc.

Here's an article:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322714...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322714000747)

~~~
ge96
Thanks this stuff is awesome. Like that one drone that was caught by a fishing
net.

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kendallpark
What will the resolution be? If it's fairly detailed, I could see this turning
into a Google Maps for armchair treasure hunters searching for lost vessels.
Who knows how many ships/planes are down there.

Edit: Looks like they're aiming for ~100m resolution. They specifically
mention the search for Malaysia Flight MH370 as an example for the need for
adequate ocean floor mapping.

[https://seabed2030.gebco.net/documents/seabed_2030_roadmap_v...](https://seabed2030.gebco.net/documents/seabed_2030_roadmap_v10_low.pdf)

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LightskinKanye
How is the US government allowing this?

I'd be willing to wager we have some under water assets that we don't
necessarily want to be discovered.

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oska
Who gives a fuck what the US government ‘allows’? This is highly arrogant and
entitled thinking.

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Qwertious
>Who gives a fuck what the US government ‘allows’?

Iraq and Afghanistan, for starters. If the US doesn't allow something and you
do it anyway, you tend to come up with a nasty case of Dead.

~~~
jpttsn
Those two wars were different from one another, in respects that are/should be
central to your argument, like the UN's role.

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jjr8
The article makes it sound as though the seafloor is virtually unknown outside
of areas surveyed with multibeam sonar, which is a relatively small fraction
of the seafloor. In fact, other technologies have been used to map the entire
planet to a resolution of 15-60 arc second resolution (roughly 500-2000m). See
[http://topex.ucsd.edu/WWW_html/srtm30_plus.html](http://topex.ucsd.edu/WWW_html/srtm30_plus.html)
for one such widely used, freely available dataset. What multibeam provides
over extant dataset such as that one is much higher resolution.

~~~
nine_k
At a resolution like that, a major city would be 20-50 pixels across. It's
likely great for tracking large geological features, but still must miss a lot
of interesting and important things.

~~~
jpttsn
Maybe we can let the prior assumption, that there are more geological features
than cities on the seabed, do some work?

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blunte
No mention of the impact on marine life of this blanket of sonar... Maybe I'm
too environmentally concerned, but it would seem a bit foolish to do something
like this without having a pretty solid understanding of what negative impact
it could have.

~~~
cetalingua
You are absolutely right. In fact, multibeam sonar use for sea floor mapping
was connected to a devastating mass stranding in Madagascar
[http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/news/whale-mass-
stranding-...](http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/news/whale-mass-stranding-
attributed-sonar-mapping-first-time)

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SubiculumCode
If you want a good idea how deep is the deepest part of the ocean (Mariana
Trench), look up in the sky and find a jet flying at full altitude (37,000
feet).

That is how deep.

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peterjlee
How can you tell if a jet is flying at full altitude? Is it actually visible?

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SubiculumCode
Good question. I've seen passenger jets get pretty small to the eye sometimes,
and they don't tend to go higher than 37,000 feet.

Alternatively, if you've ever flown across the country, mid-flight, look down.

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ygra
The flight I took from the US back to Europe was at 42000 feet. Not that the
difference in altitude matters much.

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PhantomGremlin
The article mentions the USS San Francisco, but I think the details are
interesting. They highlight how little we know.

The San Francisco, a nuclear attack submarine, operating at flank speed at a
depth of 525 feet, collided with an underwater mountain. Extensive damage, 98
crew injured, one dead.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_\(SSN-711\)#Collision_with_seamount)

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samstave
Claim was mountain, rumor was another sub...

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arethuza
UK and French ballistic missile subs have collided:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_and_Le_Triomphant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_and_Le_Triomphant_submarine_collision)

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logicallee
>It’s a common sentiment among Earth scientists—often a lament—that we know
more about other planets in the solar system than we do our own. Indeed,
astronomers have a more complete topographical understanding of the moon,
Mars, ex-planet Pluto and the dwarf planet Ceres than we do of the seabed.
This is shocking, because the topography of the seafloor plays such a huge
role in keeping the planet habitable—a role we need to fully understand in
order to predict what the future of our climate holds.

>The reason we have no comprehensive map is dumbfoundingly simple, considering
that we’ve traversed and charted our solar system: “It’s not so easy to map
the ocean, because the water is in the way,” says Jakobsson.

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ChuckMcM
and there are military applications as navigating near the sea floor is
greatly facilitated by having accurate maps. I am a bit surprised this isn't
an NGA effort.

~~~
wongarsu
But why would the military share those maps with the public? After all, that
would facilitate military applications by the enemy. Much better to quietly
make the maps and not tell anyone.

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lighthazard
Same reason they share GPS?

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wongarsu
To avoid navigational errors and save civilian lives, and presumably to make
everyone depended on US-operated satellites (at least the last one is probably
the reason why Russia and the EU both now operate their own system)?

Honestly, I struggle to find any reasoning on why GPS is shared with the world
beyond "Korean Air Lines 007 crashed, so Pres. Reagan made GPS free to (save
the world|gain political capital). Later we removed the civilian precision
restriction because that's cheaper than maintaining it", which I find a bit
weak. Maybe somebody can enlighten me

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lithos
How much value has Google and similar created with GPS.

It slowed the need for other countries to put their own up.

The satellites were not a secret

Their encryption scheme was probably already cracked, so might as well open it
anyways.

~~~
_delirium
It wasn't so much Google. The big players lobbying for the civilian
degradation to be turned off in the late 1990s were the airline industry.
Within the government, the FAA was also a big advocate, hoping it would be
able to retire various other expensive systems if it could count on a reliable
GPS.

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rdiddly
Would this be an appropriate project for _Boaty McBoatface_ (the remote
submersible attached to the _Attenborough_ )? I kind of hope so, obviously.

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mnw21cam
> “Mines on land are soon going to run out,” Scott says. “Every electronic
> device in the world has rare earth [metals] in it ... we need raw
> resources.”

Rare earth mines on land are nowhere near running out.

~~~
FRex
And they can (apparently, I'm not an expert) be reclaimed. It's very
technically challenging and expensive but they are still in all these old
devices in Chinese landfills. They are not used up, I'd call them 'raw
materials' not 'raw resources'. Oil and coal are 'raw resources' that you
can't get back after they are used up.

One could even make an argument that time and money could be better spent
researching a better recycling process for e-trash than trying to mine the
ocean floor.

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known
Humans explored just 5% of sea floor;

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
>Scott agrees that habitats around mining operations will be impacted. Still,
based on his experience, he says, “I think [the effects] will be less
substantial” than mining on land, which is known to have catastrophic
environmental consequences ranging from acid mine drainage that pollutes water
to toxic clouds of dust. “None of those things will be a problem in the
ocean,” Scott says.

So people are worried that a scientific expedition that vastly increases our
knowledge of our world is controversial because it will make mining
easier/more profitable?!?

Per the quote above that it will be less damaging than the current mining we
do on land. We should be doing everything to make this type of deep ocean
mining more economical. In addition, it should be easier to enforce
environmental regulations on deep ocean mining as the mining operations will
be international waters and susceptible to visits by various navies and
interested parties on boats. This would also help with a lot of the problems
we have with land mining (opacity to the outside world, conflict materials,
human rights abuses, displacement of existing populations due to mine
locations).

This opposition just seems very illogical.

~~~
dandelany
Even if we were to take this guy's word for it (which we obviously
shouldn't)...

> it should be easier to enforce environmental regulations on deep ocean
> mining as the mining operations will be international waters

Precisely which regulations are you talking about, and who do you imagine
enforcing them? The International Seabed Authority, of which the US is _not_ a
member state, and whose Law of the Sea Convention they have repeatedly
_declined to ratify_? Good luck with that.

~~~
samstave
Please don't spill oil into the environment which will kill the environment.

Violators must tow such disasters outside of said environment before returning
regular exploitative operations.

Thank you,

The Management

