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Alvin's underwater wonderland

Another nifty way of visualizing scientific data: Deep-Sea News (gotta love them niche blogs) reports that over 3,500 dives by the Alvin submarine (star of many a National Geographic Special) are now mapped to KML as part of the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS) project.

Deep-Sea News has the lowdown on the Alvin dives. in the meantime, I went trawling through the geodata directories of MGDS, and found many more interesting KML files. For example:

• High resolution maps of the ocean floor of the Pacific, as mapped by Alvin.
• An awesome KML file with the names of thousands of ocean floor geographic features. It's like Geonames.org for underwater geography.
• Huge high resolution maps of the Indian Ocean (not for the faint of CPU).
• Thousands of sediment cores, georeferenced to their database entries online.
• The Earth's tectonic plates and boundaries. (Nice one)
  
  
  
• Several hundred georeferenced photos of the seabed, as if Alvin had a Flickr account (and why wouldn't it?).
  
  
  

I'm just exhausted from exploring this treasure trove. Go do your own digging here. (it's OK, MGDS links to it from the home page.) It definitely makes you wish for the promised bathymetry data in Google Earth.

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