Name: Mapping the seafloor with the Multibeam Echosounder
Uploaded: 2025-07-22T01:34:55.000Z
Duration: 2 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I always tell everyone, it's like whatever you see on land, all the mountains, the ridges, even the meandering rivers, you can also see that on the seafloor, but on a massive scale.

Hi, my name is Haya Roperas, and I am the lead mapping coordinator for Inkfish.

So here in the Nova Canton trough, we've got a suite of scientific assets that we're deploying every single day while we're here.

So that's using our EM124, which is a multi-beam echo sounder.

So that not only maps the shape of the seafloor, but it also gives us information on the composition.

So it's something called backscatter intensity.

First thing is that we pick our locations for all our deployments, including the sub dives based on the mathematical data, because that's where we will see the topography of the terrain of the seafloor.

So we don't want to put the landers on a very slopey area where it will roll down.

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The mapping systems that we have also can give us the idea of how hard or soft the seafloor material is.

All right, I'm just going to bring us onto our heading.

After we pick the site, the sub team and the scientists will decide on how they will be doing the transect when they reach the seafloor.

And that is also guided by what we see in the mathematical data.

Sometimes it will be a very boring flat, and then suddenly there's a bump in there.

Like, see, if we look at these two seamounts, we can say that one is relatively new, when the other one has had so many processes that happened to it, like probably eruption, or there's also like so many landslides in there.

So that's one thing that really makes the job exciting, is to be able to see these things.

When you look at the Chepco grid, which is at 450 meters resolution, you only see like  But when we map it, it will be like in different shape and in different kind of ruggedness of the terrain.

As of the moment, only at least 25% of the entire ocean floor on Earth is mapped.

The rule of thumb for me, whenever the vessel is moving, we'll be mapping.