Undersea Mysteries Mapped by Satellite Gravity Sensors
Space missions reveal hidden hills and buried rifts in the ocean depths.
Ancient rifts hide under seafloor sediments along with thousands of uncharted underwater mountains, satellite images revealed on Thursday.
Most of the world's deep ocean remains poorly charted, as the fruitless search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean earlier this year showed. The new satellite images released by the journal Science map undersea features as small as three miles across (five kilometers) for the first time.
The satellites mapped much of the world's oceans, including the Gulf of Mexico, South China Sea, and South Atlantic.
"The only way to see ocean floor topography quickly and comprehensively is from space," says study lead author David Sandwell of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. "Ships
