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Coral Reef Arks: An In Situ Mesocosm and Toolkit for Assembling Reef Communities
Published on: January 6, 2023
Abyssal marine tectonics from the SWOT mission
Yao Yu1, David T Sandwell1, Gerald Dibarboure2
1Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Abstract:
The global ocean covers 71% of Earth's surface, yet the seafloor is poorly charted compared with land, the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Traditional ocean mapping uses ship-based soundings and nadir satellite radar altimetry-one limited in spatial coverage and the other in spatial resolution. The joint NASA-CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission uses phase-coherent, wide-swath radar altimetry to measure ocean surface heights at high precision. We show that 1 year of SWOT data offers more detailed information than 30 years of satellite nadir altimetry in marine gravity, enabling the detection of intricate seafloor structures at 8-kilometer spatial resolution. With the mission still ongoing, SWOT promises critical insights for bathymetric charting, tectonic plate reconstruction, underwater navigation, and deep ocean mixing.
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