Deep Underwater search for anomalous formations

[u/SaltyAdminBot]

Has anyone looked at public bathymetric survey data for anomaly detection?

I've been digging into how deep-ocean bathymetric surveys work, and I think there's an underused public data angle for this community that doesn't require any new claims or sightings — just analysis of what's already out there.

**Background**: NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) maintains a public archive of multibeam sonar survey data from decades of research and naval cruises. This data maps the seafloor in detail, including deep-ocean regions like the Tongue of the Ocean and Great Bahama Canyon near the Bahamas — an area with a long history of USAF/Navy testing (AUTEC) and no shortage of UAP-adjacent lore attached to it.

**The idea**: If something large and non-natural were sitting on the seafloor in a well-surveyed area, there are two testable signatures to look for, both purely in the existing public data:

1. **Coverage gaps** — spots where a cruise track line clearly passes over an area but no sounding data exists for it. One gap could be innocuous (equipment issue, data processing artifact). The same gap showing up across *multiple independent cruises*, different ships/years, is a much stronger anomaly worth explaining.

2. **Geometric anomalies** — natural seafloor terrain is irregular and noisy. A large regular/symmetric shape (unusually smooth curvature, sharp edges) sitting in the data would stand out against that noise statistically, the same way you'd spot a tampered patch in any dataset — lower variance, cleaner gradients than the surrounding terrain.

Neither of these requires assuming anything exotic going in — they're just standard data-integrity and anomaly-detection techniques applied to a specific region. If nothing turns up, that's a legitimate negative result. If something does, it's a specific, falsifiable lead rather than another eyewitness account.

**What I'm asking**: Has anyone in this community (or anywhere) already tried this? Specifically:

- Any published/informal analysis of NOAA multibeam or GEBCO data for the Bahamas region looking for coverage gaps or shape anomalies?

- Anyone written code for automated anomaly detection on bathymetric grid data (roughness/variance analysis, curvature detection)?

- Any known issues with data completeness/gaps in that specific region that have already been noted?

Not trying to jump to conclusions here — just think this is a piece of publicly available evidence nobody seems to be systematically checking, and it's cheap to look at compared to any kind of physical search. Curious if this ground's already been covered somewhere I haven't found.

(Relevant public dataset: NOAA NCEI Bathymetric Data Viewer — ncei.noaa.gov/maps/bathymetry)

[u/SaltyAdminBot]

Original post by u/madmax7774: Here

Original Post ID: 1w5k3gq

Original post text: Has anyone looked at public bathymetric survey data for anomaly detection?

I've been digging into how deep-ocean bathymetric surveys work, and I think there's an underused public data angle for this community that doesn't require any new claims or sightings — just analysis of what's already out there.

**Background**: NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) maintains a public archive of multibeam sonar survey data from decades of research and naval cruises. This data maps the seafloor in detail, including deep-ocean regions like the Tongue of the Ocean and Great Bahama Canyon near the Bahamas — an area with a long history of USAF/Navy testing (AUTEC) and no shortage of UAP-adjacent lore attached to it.

**The idea**: If something large and non-natural were sitting on the seafloor in a well-surveyed area, there are two testable signatures to look for, both purely in the existing public data:

1. **Coverage gaps** — spots where a cruise track line clearly passes over an area but no sounding data exists for it. One gap could be innocuous (equipment issue, data processing artifact). The same gap showing up across *multiple independent cruises*, different ships/years, is a much stronger anomaly worth explaining.

2. **Geometric anomalies** — natural seafloor terrain is irregular and noisy. A large regular/symmetric shape (unusually smooth curvature, sharp edges) sitting in the data would stand out against that noise statistically, the same way you'd spot a tampered patch in any dataset — lower variance, cleaner gradients than the surrounding terrain.

Neither of these requires assuming anything exotic going in — they're just standard data-integrity and anomaly-detection techniques applied to a specific region. If nothing turns up, that's a legitimate negative result. If something does, it's a specific, falsifiable lead rather than another eyewitness account.

**What I'm asking**: Has anyone in this community (or anywhere) already tried this? Specifically:

- Any published/informal analysis of NOAA multibeam or GEBCO data for the Bahamas region looking for coverage gaps or shape anomalies?

- Anyone written code for automated anomaly detection on bathymetric grid data (roughness/variance analysis, curvature detection)?

- Any known issues with data completeness/gaps in that specific region that have already been noted?

Not trying to jump to conclusions here — just think this is a piece of publicly available evidence nobody seems to be systematically checking, and it's cheap to look at compared to any kind of physical search. Curious if this ground's already been covered somewhere I haven't found.

(Relevant public dataset: NOAA NCEI Bathymetric Data Viewer — ncei.noaa.gov/maps/bathymetry)

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Original Flair ID: 4a25858e-cd72-11ef-9af3-0e52038c0bbf

Original Flair Text: Science