An Approach to the Quantitative Study of Sea Floor Topography.

This report represents an assessment of sea floor and sub-sea floor relief as related to acoustic bottom interaction. Marine topography, whose amplitude spans six orders of magnitude, is here divided into three broad categories 1 features likely to cause propagation blockage, 2 features which act as sloping bottoms, and 3 features which act as acoustic scatterers. Maps of the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans are presented which delimit the areas where each of these three categories would be expected to dominate propagation.