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Hydrographic Surveying Quick Facts  QUICK FACTS - Hydrographic Surveying The ocean is one enormous body of saltwater and covers so much of the planet, that Earth looks blue from space. HMS Endurance is a fully equipped hydrographic surveying ship and can survey in both the deep-water oceans and the inshore waters of Antarctica. Navigation, dredging, oil, gas and mineral resource exploration and environmental monitoring are just a few of the marine environments that depend the accurate information from a hydrographic survey. Hydrographic surveyors use state of-the-arts technology ranging from satellites, to echo sounders as part of their work. Echo sounders have been in use since the 1914-18 war. Echo sounding discovered the Mariana Trench in 1951. The Mariana Trench reaches down to 10,920 metres below sea level. All the large oceans have undersea mountain ridges. The longest is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that stretches 11,300 km from north of Iceland to the Antarctic. Some mountains are over 4000m high - as high as the Rockies and the Alps. River dolphins use sound to find their way in murky water. Their eyesight is so bad that they can hardly tell night from day. They can tell where objects are by measuring the time it takes for the noises they make to return as echoes. Using this method they can detect pieces of wire, just 1mm thick. After this deployment, it is planned that HMS Endurance will be fitted with a multi-beam echo sounder suite, which will significantly improve the Ship's surveying capabilities and will bring her into line with the other survey units HMS Echo and Enterprise. In 1958, the submarine USS Nautilus sailed under the Arctic Ocean ice - finally proving there is no land under the North Pole. Thousands of mountains called seamounts lie under the ocean. The biggest ocean in the world is the Pacific and it is large than all the other oceans put together More Information >> Hydrographic Surveying Contents >> Quick Facts<< Introduction Importance of Hydrographic Surveying Work Period 1 UK Hydrographic Office Links