Global Sea Floor Map

From BBC Sky at Night Magazine:

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It's a relatively well-known fact that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own ocean floor.

A new project seeks to map the whole of the ocean floor in unprecedented detail by 2030.

To that end, NASA has released an amazing map (above and below)

showing the terrain of the seabed captured by an Earth-orbiting satellite that uses gravity to detail underwater canyons and ridges.

Because geologic features like seamounts and abyssal hills have more mass than their surroundings, they have a slightly stronger gravitational pull.

This creates small bumps in the surface of the sea above them, and researchers can use this to predict the kind of seafloor feature that produced them.