Ping editing

Today I learned about ping editing. This is the end of a very long and complicated process. The ship uses a "multibeam" system. Simply, on the bottom of the boat there is a device that periodically shoots a "ping" a big sound off into the water. The sound then goes to the rocks and sediment below the boat (this can be 20-800 meters deep water) and reflects back to a receiver that is also connected to the boat. Our ship shoots off a "swath" of sounds to cover a big area of ground. Using basic physics laws we understand the topography of the bottom of the ocean through the reflection of the sound back to the ship. These physics laws would have to do with sound, density, salinity, etc. Each ping occurs approximately every 5 seconds (this is a rough estimate). The deeper the water, the longer it takes for the sound to reflect back to the receiver. It's really interesting. I have discovered that many different areas of geology use sound to find out about the sediment, rocks, and topography. For example, seismology is used for oil fields. Seismology is kind of like multibeam in that seismology uses sound and density to find out about rock. Oil companies dig a core (a big long cylinder out of the ground) then send an electric wire down the hole and put of a big sound. This sound reflects back telling the oil company what kinds of rock are around in addition if there are petroleum wells, gases, etc. Anyway, I'll stop boring you all with that now. What ping editing does is edit each sound's reflection. Due to different things that can react with the sound such as bubbles, big waves, floating objects, ice, etc, the pings collect a lot of errors. I get to go through all of the data and make sure the topography that is reflected follows a pattern like all geology does. Like, when you are going up a hill, there is a slope, it isn't just straight up vertically without any gradual movement up to that. The errors in the pings usually turn up like a vertical change in topography which is pretty much impossible with geology. Anyway, yeah, that's what I did today, I will be back with more background in a few days.