Wired reports on the mapping problems that led to the undersea accident that has the USS San Francisco in drydock, as well as new mapping technology that holds promise for improving undersea mapping. Money quotes:
"Precision surveys only exist for less than 10 percent of the world’s oceans, usually well-traveled commercial routes," said Capt. Jeffery Best of the Naval Oceanographic Office in south Mississippi.
To make matters worse, scanning techniques until recently have been ineffective. "Most of the world’s oceans are imprecisely mapped, and depths from Captain Cook using lead lines are still used on some charts," said Barbara Reed, director of the Naval Oceanographic Office’s hydrography department.
Incomplete and outdated charts seem to have been the problem in the case of the San Francisco.
Since the accident, the submarine’s commander has been reassigned pending a full investigation, but officials at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Bethesda, Maryland, revealed that the seabed charts had not been updated since 1989. A blurry satellite image of the accident site from 1999 gives only a suggestion of a submerged structure, according to the agency — it could just as easily be a plankton bloom or an oil slick.