(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of researchers has presented an updated map of the Southern Ocean of Antarctica. For the first time, the so-called “Factorian Abyss” is plotted on it – the new deepest point of this region.
According to Live Science, the updated map has become the most detailed map in the history of observations. It takes into account recent research conducted by the Five Depths expedition.
It is interesting that it was organized and headed by an American businessman Victor Veskovo. The project was originally intended to map the deepest points of the five oceans.
The Factorian Abyss was discovered in 2019 by the Limiting Factor remotely operated deep-sea submersible. By the way, the depression is named after this apparatus.
It turned out to be the deepest point of the Southern Ocean of Antarctica, its reliably measured depth is 7437 meters.
Victor Veskovo himself became the discoverer – he personally piloted an underwater vehicle. The Factorian Deep is part of the Atlantic Ocean’s South Sandwich Trench, a submarine canyon that stretches for about 965 kilometers between South America and Antarctica.
Vescovo’s expedition for the first time mapped not only the “Factorian Abyss”, but also the indicated trench along its entire length. The deepest point of the Southern Ocean, by the way, is south of the 60th parallel.
By the way, the map within the framework of the Five Depths project will still be supplemented. It started in 2013, and its initial goal was to create a bathymetric map of the Southern Ocean.
But then the scope of the project was expanded, to create a map using all the new sets of hydroacoustic data collected mainly by scientific vessels from around the world and the icebreakers that pave the way for them.
It is expected that the final map of the seabed will be completed by 2030. Its current version is based on over 1200 sonar datasets.
The map covers a vast area exceeding 48 million square kilometers of the seabed. Compared to the first map released in 2013, the coverage of the mapped area has more than doubled.
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