Now, armed with data from high-resolution radar satellites, including the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 and SARAL from the Indian and French space agencies, the team can detect seamounts just 1100 meters tall-close to the lower limit of what defines a seamount, Sandwell says. But the team knew its first catalog was far from complete. They identified thousands, including 700 particularly shallow ones that posed hazards to submarines. ”Īfter the USS San Francisco accident, Sandwell and his colleagues secured funding from the Navy and NGA to hunt for seamounts with satellites. “The better we understand the shape of the sea floor, the better we can prepare. And they are pot-stirrers that help control the large-scale ocean flows responsible for sequestering vast amounts of heat and carbon dioxide, says John Lowell, chief hydrographer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which runs the U.S. Their size and distribution hold clues to plate tectonics and magmatism. Besides posing navigational hazards, the mountains harbor rare-earth minerals that make them commercial targets for deep-sea miners.
Published this month in Earth and Space Science, the new seamount catalog is “a great step forward,” says Larry Mayer, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. “It’s just mind boggling,” says David Sandwell, a marine geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who helped lead the work.
The vast majority-more than 27,000-remain uncharted by sonar. High-resolution radar data have now added more than 19,000 new ones. A 2011 census using the method found more than 24,000. But radar satellites that measure ocean height can also find them, by looking for subtle signs of seawater mounding above a hidden seamount, tugged by its gravity. With only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped with sonar, it is impossible to know how many seamounts exist. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array. In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard.
submarine fleet’s biggest adversary lately hasn’t been Red October.
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