BIOS601 Resources: Oceanography Data

[updated July 31, 2020]

Background

Murray, J. 1888. On the height of the land and the depth of the ocean. Scottish Geographical Magazine 1:1-41.
Article in Montreal Gazette in May 2010 on how close 19th-century Murray's calculation came to state-of-the-art 2010 calculations on depth and volume of the seven seas.

Scientific article (Charette MA and Smith WHF. The Volume of Earth's Ocean. (2010) Oceanography Vol.23, No.2, 112-114) that was the source for the 2010 newspaper article.

Newspaper and Oceanography articles combined
Hanley J. 2014. How Deep is the Ocean? Significance magazine.
Figure 4(A & B) which JH prepared for the 'How Deep is the Ocean?' article in Significance, but which was dropped from the final (published) version (above).
new, July2020 Newspaper coverage of preparation of the Great Eastern for its 1866 cable-laying voyage

along with modern-day photographs 1 2 3 4 5 of Hungry Hill and Berehaven Harbour.
new, June2020 One-fifth of Earth's ocean floor is now mapped (BBC 2020) The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project

new, July2020 Google's Grace Hopper undersea cable from this article

(Getting) The data referred to in the 'Data-Mining Challenge' in the 'How Deep is the Ocean?' article in Significance

Satellite Geodesy website.
A practical way for those with limited computing budgets to obtain (small!) sections of these data is via

NEW. Get ASCII XYZ-file, region V6.0 December 2, 2009
```
   See below (*) for the conventions for using this tool  
   
```
To automate the use of this tool in order to (within R) obtain elevation/depth readings at a sample of latitude/longitude points, Here is some R code for 2 R functions [at the end of the R code, JH has also added some notes on how to generate random locations on a sphere] ...
```
     getDataforOneLocation(lat,long)             ... the reading at, or nearest to, a single point
      
     getDataforRectangle(latN,latS, longW,longE) ... readings for all locations in the box
   
```
these functions use the same conventions as below,. There is some error checking, but the function is provided 'as is', without any warranty -- so don't try to sue the author if your boat runs aground somewhere.

For ways to generate random points on the surface of a sphere, here is one link: Wolfram. For others, Google "random points on sphere"

   -------
    (*) You can give the box boundaries of the box for greater Montreal as 
   
           45.66                                           45.66N
   -74.0            -73.4              or...      74.0W            73.4W                
           45.33                                           45.33N
   
   a coastal area in Equador as
           
           0.08                                           0.08N
   -80.1            -79.9              or...      82.1W            79.9W                
          -0.07                                           0.07S
           
           
  and an area mostly to the north of Singapore as
           
           1.490                                           1.490N
   103.6            104.1              or...      103.6E            104.1E                
           1.224                                           1.224N
           
   
   LatLng Tooltip in Google maps (see  Google Maps green 'lab' icon in upper right)
   displays a tooltip next to the mouse cursor showing the latlng directly underneath it.
   
   Convention is that ... latitudes go from -90 (South Pole) to 90 (North Pole)
                 and      longitudes go from 0 (Greenwich) East to +180 and West to -180.