The World According To Measurements - 24

Mysterious Planet

The world according to measurements, to be accurate, must include a robust quantity of ocean measurements in order to be comprehensive.

Yet we have a more comprehensive set of measurements of the planet Mars than we do of the oceans of the Earth:

"But even with all the technology that we have today -- satellites, buoys, underwater vehicles and ship tracks -- we have better maps of the surface of Mars and the moon than we do the bottom of the ocean. We know very, very little about most of the ocean. This is especially true for the middle and deeper parts far away from the coasts."

(NASA, emphasis added). The Dredd Blog struggles to change all that by using all of what we now have (The World According To Measurements, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23).

Today's post is about the reality that we are still behind in this endeavor to find out where we are in terms of our own planet (You Are Here).

II. Updates

I recently updated the OMG, WHOI, and SOCCOM sections of the Dredd Blog databases composed of in situ ocean measurements, which along with the WOD data itself (about 5.5 billion in situ measurements - WOD Update) gives us a workable trend view.

III. Appendices

Even with all that being available, one of the appendices to today's post shows a lot of zero percentages for widespread areas of the ocean, indicating that arguably it has not yet been explored sufficiently (Appendix One).

Appendix One contains Pelagic Depth percentages that add up to ~100%  for each year that data was collected by hard working scientists and then stored in those data sets.

The other appendix is composed of graphs that include the trend view using all of the data, including the updates (Appendix Two).

IV. Closing Comments

We have a long way to go before we know as much as we should know don't we?

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.