Description

After the “USO Base” claims and google censorship received so much attention, I had to speak up because it’s simply not true and we can verify it with actual data. I’m a marine scientist that has spent approx 6 years professionally working with bathymetric data just like this. Evaluating seafloor data is my job.To (http://job.To) understand what’s going on here, you have to understand the technologies we’ve used to measure the seafloor over time. There is not a magical satellite that is able to collect information about the entire seafloor at once. I’ll give a short description of the most common tech:

* Historical Sounding Data: Very coarse, inaccurate data from really old hydrographic surveys. These data are generally from the 1800’s early 1900’s
* Sonar: A transmitter and receiver based system that uses sound to estimate depth. Fairly inaccurate but can work at great depths.
* Multibeam Surveys: A type of sonar that’s much more accurate, can be towed behind jetskis, small vessels, some military vessels are outfitted with them.
* Airborne Lidar: A specialized lidar platform that is attached to aircraft that shoots frickin’ laser beams and can be used to collect high-resolution, high-accuracy benthic elevation data in clear waters up to about 20 m. The math that makes this work is witchcraft.
* Gravitational measurements: for the deepest parts of the ocean, we can use specialized satellites than can measure the gravitational perturbations as they pass over various ratios of seawater and earth and can estimate depth. The math behind this is also witchcraft and I don’t pretend to understand it.