Abstract:
Upon the release of the previously classified data from the
U.S. Navy GEOSAT satellite in July 1995, researchers from Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and NOAA's National Ocean Service Office
of Ocean and Earth Science have created a detailed map of marine
gravity anomalies from the satellite altimeter data.
The satellite measured the distance from the satellite to sea surface
from March 1985
... to October 1986. The distance data have been
processed to depict small changes in the force of gravity throughout
the oceans. These changes in gravity are the result of geologic
features on the ocean floor. Because the previously classified Navy
data are highly accurate (the altimeter measured distances of 500 miles
accurate to 1 inch), and because of the GEOSAT mission's dense
coverage, the gravity anomalies provide a view of the seafloor with
unprecedented detail. To make the map, the GEOSAT data was combined
with data from the European Space Agency's ERS-1 Satellite.
The data are useful in studies of navigation, ocean bathymetry,
undersea volcanoes, plate tectontics, petroleum geology, and
lithosphere structure.
The raw GEOSAT data are available on 4 CD-ROMs from the National
Oceanographic Data Center:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov
The processed marine gravity anomaly data are available from Scripps
in 2-minute or 3-minute grids:
ftp://baltica.ucsd.edu/pub
The marine gravity anomaly maps and more information can be found on
the World Wide Web at the National Geophysical Data Center:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/announcements/announce_predict.html
Hardcopy posters are available for $40 (check payable to Regents of
the University fo California) from Scripps:
University of California at San Diego
Geological Data Center-0223
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla CA 90293-0223
[The information provided here was condensed from the NGDC WWW pages.] 
