Is coming a novelty for those who love the sea will soon be possible to observe the deep ocean sitting comfortably at home, just "browsing" the maps made available through the Internet. After the completion of Google Earth and the various features of Google Maps, such as Street View, the famous company in Mountain View has just signed an agreement with NOAA, the American agency for oceans and atmosphere, for mapping the seabed ocean with a precision never seen.

Terms of the deal between Google and NOAA are very wide and the possibilities regarding the development of applications has been left to the imagination of programmers the agency for the oceans has in fact made available to the computer maker around its database of information on oceans the climate and atmosphere, and in exchange will get the help of Google to develop programs to gather data and make them accessible to the public.

Richard Spinrad, NOAA's director, has said: "We have an incredible amount of data on land systems, we are always looking for better ways to make them available to the public and Google is certainly the most expert in handling database so large volume.

It was explained that the first applications to be developed by Google deals with improving the visualization of data already in the database. NOAA's information will thus enrich the maps included in oceanic Google Earth and especially add information about the coastal areas. In contrast, NOAA will use the progress in developing the project "Science on a Sphere", the realization and enjoyment of the data on a touchscreen device, spherical, and Spinrad said about it: "Even now you can see on Google Earth effective data on a flat screen, imagine what could be done on a sphere.''

Google programs will also be tasked to add the time dimension to data provided by NOAA to increase the detail in the view of the ocean floor not only geographically but also in terms of time, showing a series of changes in over the years. Another project will deal with the viewing data in real time, which will be delivered by video and high-definition images that will send the "Okeanos Explorer, the flagship of the fleet of NOAA oceanographic. In this way the public, but especially the scientists around the world, can participate directly to the comments. Spinrad said on: "What we want from Google is that everyone in the world can see for example what is happening on the bottom of the Indian Ocean in real time. Not only through the video, but also making available all possible data on the area. "

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