Super-fine satellite radar finds 20,000 unknown undersea mountains

Significantly more sensitive instruments on satellites have now led to the fact that almost 20,000 new volcanoes could be discovered. These usually elude view as they are found on the seabed of the deep sea.

The huge deep-sea regions of the earth have only been explored to a limited extent. For example, only about a quarter of them can be classified as mapped. What the earth’s surface looks like in the other areas that are covered by at least 200 meters of water – often much more – is usually only roughly known. And that definitely has consequences: It happened more than once that submarines collided with submarine mountains that were either unknown or that were newly created by volcanism.

A team led by Julie Gevorgian from the University of California San Diego has now published research in the journal Earth and Space Science (via spectrum), where 19,325 previously unknown seamounts were found, each rising more than a thousand meters above the rest of the region’s seabed. Their mapping is not only important for submarine drivers, but also for scientists who simulate ocean currents or research the geological development of the earth.

tiny structures

Until now, the problem was that the measuring instruments could only record very massive volcanic mountains in the ocean that reached heights of 2500 meters or more. Since it is not so easy to see through the water masses of the seas, radar data from satellites is usually used here. Due to gravitational effects, the water billows a bit over massive mountains, revealing telltale structures on the surface. In the case of volcanoes that belong to the group that has now been discovered, this effect was so weak that it was lost in the normal “noise” of ocean movements.

However, the ESA satellite CryoSat-2 and other new instruments can now filter out significantly finer structures from the noise. In this way, the researchers went in search of tiny uplifts in the surface of the oceans and were able to locate the mountains mentioned.

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