SWOT: NASA's first global survey of Earth's surface water, providing data for clean air and water, extreme events, and long-term environmental changes

Newswise — Antarctic ice cliffs are retreating amid warming, and intense ice–ocean exchange shapes coastal environments. High-resolution nearshore topography underpins ice–ocean studies and safe station resupply, since icebreakers cannot approach shallow bays and small boats need reliable depth data. Conventional vessel sonar is inefficient and risks grounding; satellite imagery has limited resolution; airborne lidar is costly; spectral bathymetry is substrate-sensitive. Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle– Structure-from-Motion (UAV-SfM) offers low-cost mapping, but water refraction, floating ice, and large gravel complicate seabed extraction. Seal Bay near China’s Qinling Station exemplifies these conditions. Given these challenges, in-depth research is needed on cost-effective, high-resolution bathymetric mapping in remote Antarctic shallow gravel-bed bays. A Sun Yat-sen University-led team, with the Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Survey Technology and Application, Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Polar Research Institute of China, published (DOI: 10.34133/remotesensing.1071) the study on 3 September 2026 in Journal of Remote Sensing. It addresses a practical gap: shallow Antarctic bays need accurate seabed maps for navigation, station construction, and equipment deployment, yet conventional surveys are slow, costly, or unsafe. The team tested UAV-SfM photogrammetry as a non-invasive, consumer-camera-based alternative directly in gravel-bed settings. At Seal Bay, the workflow reconstructed dense point clouds and produced a...

The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) aims to provide the most authoritative, publicly available bathymetry data sets for the world's oceans.

The work draws on the visual language of multibeam bathymetry and sidescan sonar: depth-coloured survey swaths, black “no data” gaps between them, and a greyscale sonar strip. The scene is drawn in code (Java) as a procedurally generated terrain, with a camera travelling along it. The slope appears to rise from the seabed into the sky. The image was then distorted with wavelet degradation in Haar Paint. Colours and layout are derived from a seed value. It is meant to read as a sonar record of a land that is not on the map.

Surface Water and Ocean Topography-derived gravity improves global bathymetric predictions, especially in areas of complex seafloor Five independent machine learning models produce remarkably con...

In this communication we introduce marmap, a package designed for downloading, plotting and manipulating bathymetric and topographic data in R. marmap can query the ETOPO1 bathymetry and topography da...