What the Earth would look like without oceans | Daily Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3192653/The-Earth-stripped-oceans-digital-map-sea-floor-reveals-planet-s-alien-
This is the first ever digital map of the Earth’s seafloor, revealing deep ocean basins to be much more complex than previously thought.
The last complete map was hand-drawn in the 1970s.
But now, following half a century of research collating around 15,000 samples from research ships, the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences has developed an unprecedented impression of the world in stunning detail.
The map, published in the latest edition of Geology, offers fresh insights into the depths of the world’s oceans, which make up 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface, and how they have been affected by climate change.
Crucially, researchers found, much of the seafloor is not covered in clay but a ’complex patchwork of microfossil remains’.