ESA CryoSat-2 and Jason-1 Satellites detect 'thousands' of new ocean-bottom mountains

ESA CryoSat-2 and NASA's Jason-1 satellites capture new gravity data.

ESA's CryoSat-2 and NASA's Jason-1 satellites capture new gravity data gives us our clearest view yet of the shape of the ocean floor

It is not every day you can announce the discovery of thousands of new mountains on Earth, but that is what a US-European research team has done.

What is more, these peaks are all at least 1.5km high.

ESA's CryoSat-2 Earth Observation satellite.

Credit: ESA

The reason they have gone unrecognised until now is because they are at the bottom of the ocean.

Prof Dave Sandwell (UCSD) and colleagues used Cryosat-2 and Jason-1 radar satellites to discern the mountains' presence under water and report their findings in Science Magazine.

"In the previous radar dataset we could see everything taller than 2km, and there were 5,000 seamounts," Prof Sandwell told reporters.

"With our new dataset, and we haven't fully done the work yet, I'm guessing we can see things that are 1.5km tall.

"That might not sound like a huge improvement but the number of seamounts goes up exponentially with decreasing size.

"So, we may be able to detect another 25,000 on top of the 5,000 already known," the Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher explained.

The new detailed map of the sea floor is available here.

Knowing where the seamounts are is important for fisheries management and conservation, because it is around these topographic highs that wildlife tends to congregate.

The roughness of the seafloor is important also as it steers currents and promotes mixing, behaviours that are critical to understanding how the oceans transport heat and influence the climate.

But our knowledge of the seafloor is poor; witness the problems they have had searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet MH370, which is believed to have crashed west of Australia.

Seeing fracture zones tells scientists about the movement of the continents
The problem is that saltwater is opaque to all the standard techniques that are used to map mountains on land.

Ship-borne echosounders can gather very high-resolution information by bouncing sound off bottom structures, but less than 10% of the global oceans have been properly surveyed in this way because of the effort it involves.

Giant Magellan Telescope: New Mega-Telescope in Chilean Andes

Artist's impression of the Giant Magellan Telescope's mirror system.

Credit: Giant Magellan Telescope /GMTO Corporation

A gigantic telescope designed to help astronomers solve some of the universe's deepest mysteries will soon start taking shape atop an arid mountain in the Chilean Andes.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) completed several major external reviews earlier this year and is on target to enter the construction phase before the end of 2014, project representatives said.

If all goes according to plan, the megascope should begin observing the heavens early in the next decade.

"The group here on the project is basically anticipating that we will begin construction activities late this year," GMT director Patrick McCarthy, Carnegie Observatories, told reporters.

"We're going ahead full steam, aiming for that 2021 first light when the first few mirrors get up on the mountain, along with all the rest of the hardware."

Scientists will use the enormous telescope to probe the nature of mysterious dark energy and dark matter, find and characterise exoplanets and study how the universe's first stars and galaxies came together, GMT representatives have said.



The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be built on Chile's Las Campanas Peak, at an altitude of about 8,500 feet (2,550 meters). The site was leveled by an excavation blast in March 2012.

GMT will arrange seven 27.6-foot-wide (8.4 m) primary mirrors, the biggest single-piece astronomical mirrors ever made, into one light-collecting surface 80 feet (24 m) across.

The completed scope will have 10 times the resolving power of NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope, project representatives say.

The third primary mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is cast in a spinning furnace at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab on Aug. 23, 2013.

Credit: Mike Wall/Space.com

The GMT design also incorporates seven smaller secondary mirrors, which will change shape to counter the blurring effects of Earth's thick atmosphere.

Each of GMT's 20-ton primary mirrors must be shaped and smoothed to near perfection. Their surfaces cannot be off by more than 20 nanometers, about the width of a single glass molecule.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that six of the mirrors must be steeply curved, since they surround a central (symmetric) mirror.

Manufacturing and polishing the primary mirrors, activities that are done at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, have proved to be enormously challenging, McCarthy said.

But one of the big mirrors is finished, while two others have already been cast. Casting of the fourth one is scheduled for next March.

"So we've dealt with that as our principal technical risk, and we've retired that," McCarthy said.



Fundraising is another challenge. The project's total cost is pegged at $860 million, though perhaps another $100 million will eventually be needed to cover contingencies and the cost of inflation, McCarthy said.

The money will be provided by GMT's many partners, which include educational institutions such as the University of Arizona, Harvard and the University of Chicago, private organizations like the Carnegie Institution for Science and international entities, such as the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Money is now coming in "at a rate that makes us pretty confident that we'll manage to raise enough funds to keep the project on schedule, and that the schedule will be set by the engineering rather than by how fast we can raise money," McCarthy said.

ESA Mars Express: HRSC Images - Mountains Look Frosty

This computer-generated perspective view of Charitum Montes was created using data obtained from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express.

The image shows the large breach in the northern wall of the crater, located near to the uppermost sand dune.

Centred at around 53°S and 334°E, the image has a ground resolution of about 20 m per pixel. The image shows the large breach in the northern wall of the crater, located near to the uppermost sand dune. 

The dusting of carbon dioxide ice is a seasonal feature in this region, which covers the crater floor and the surrounding plains.

CREDIT: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

ESA's Mars Express spacecraft orbiting Mars has snapped wintry-looking pictures of a mountain range on the Red Planet's southern highlands, where ridges and crater floors are dusted with carbon dioxide frost.

The pictures were captured by the high-resolution stereo camera on the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express.

They show part of Charitum Montes, a large group of rugged mountains stretching over nearly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) near the southernmost rim of the Argyre impact basin. The brighter features represent a seasonal layer of carbon dioxide frost.

The images, which were obtained on June 18, show that the mountainous region is pockmarked with many large craters, which have been largely filled in with thick sedimentary deposits.

Annotated image of Charitum Montes.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

This colour-coded overhead view is based on an ESA Mars Express HRSC digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. 

The colour coding shows the very edge of the Charitum Montes mountain region at the top of the image, with the highest elevation, while the subtle pedestal craters that dot the image almost fade away with just a small amount of relief difference between the elevated ejecta and the surrounding area. 

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)