My Google Map Blog

In late 2014 we had a look at a map of the ocean floor published by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. . Apparently that map was incorporated into the Google Earth ocean floor data just before the New Year. Read more about it here.

Note that what appears in Google Earth is a combination of the Scripps map and a variety of other sources, including sonar data gathered by ships. Google Earth does not have historical imagery for ocean data. We have noted before that the ‘historical imagery’ mode does show a different ocean floor map, but there is no easy way to find out what Google Earth showed a few months ago other than keeping screen shots. We don’t have many screen shots of the ocean floor, but [this post]((http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2015/04/historical-imagery-ocean-floor.html) does have a screen shot taken in April 2015, so we can compare that with the current location in Google Earth today.

As far as we can tell, a number of undersea mountains have disappeared in the new data. We believe this represents errors in the older data that have been corrected.

We can also compare the current Google Earth data with the Scripps map as published here in KML format.

The Google Earth data (right) is clearly higher resolution than that version of the Scripps map (left).

The Scripps sea floor map has also been used to discover a new microplate in the Indian Ocean.

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