I was checking the position of one of the Greek islands on Google Earth and got distracted by some interesting structures shown on the seafloor north of Crete (see attached Google Earth image): first a pair of parallel lines, some 10km apart, running NW-SE in the upper right part of the image (maybe faults?); and secondly, the curious arrays of evenly spaced km-sized pimples north of Heraklion and Malia - what on Earth are they? Or could they have arisen as artefacts from the image processing, somehow (but seems doubtful)?
Just idle curiosity, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone can throw light on them.
Thanks,
Peter Skelton
Sorry - upper left for the parallel lines, not right! (ah! left and right - always so confusing!)
This is just a educated guess. The parallel lines are most likely from side scanning sonar survey or a seismic survey. Both can provide more detail and higher resolution but will create artifacts like parallel lines. Both are also often merged into lower resolution ocean bottom maps (bathymetry). The pimples or bumps are most likely real but what they are is a wild guess, if they were manganese nodules concentrations it would be much to small see on the scale you have up, so I have no idea.
Thanks, Reuben. The possibility of artefact had occurred to me and your suggestion of that for the parallel lines sounds plausible. For the pimples, from their km scale I'd wondered if they might be olistoliths, but their seemingly regular arrangement is curious - though I wonder if that regularity might not itself be an imaging artefact? Pure inexpert guess on my part! Any other ideas out there?
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