• Question: is it true that we know more about space than our oceans?

    Asked by 454evnb34 to Thomas on 20 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Thomas Clements

      Thomas Clements answered on 20 Mar 2015:

      Yes, scarily it’s true!

      An example of this is how hard it is to image the sea floor. The best map we have (http://www.nature.com/news/gravity-map-uncovers-sea-floor-surprises-1.16048) is only at a resolution of 5km – which means hills, slopes and valleys smaller than 5km don’t even get mapped!!!! NASA managed to map the whole surface of Venus to a resolution of 100m so you can see the difference – there just isn’t any water to get in the way!

      This is mainly because it is so hard to map the ocean floor because the ocean blocks radio waves from satillites. Without sending boats out (which is really expensive) it’s nearly impossible.

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