Gentlemen, my Collegues,
Perhaps it will be interesting for you, how a Hungarian cartographer — as I am — begins to study the topography of sea-floor and the names of undersea features. You know Hungary has no seas — except the so called Hungarian Sea, the Lake Balaton.
Well, I completed my studies at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest where I had learned geophysics and cartography. What I had learned as a geophysicist about the sea-floor, I tryed to find as a cartographer on maps. I was not succesful. This was at that time, when the compilation of the fifth edition of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans began, so I could not know these maps yet. And ... on other maps, which represented the topography of the sea-floor by isolines, I could not find those characteristic transform faults, which cut the ridges into pieces and called fracture zones by cartographers.
That was the story of the beginning of my work on the problems of the right representation of the sea bottom and trying to construct and use right Hungarian names of undersea features.
And now I should like to make a proposition to you, to the Commission on Marine Cartography — as I have already done to Mr Linton — to take the following two subjects into your program:
First: Making a „Multilingual gazetteer of undersea features”; which contains not only the official names with a pair of coordinates and those names that have appeared on different maps — as the Gazetteer of Board on Geographic Names does —, but containes a map as well, on which we can see the right places, and the right areas together with their names. I have already finished this gazetteer for the Arctic Ocean, but I need some help completing my work in this territory and continuing it on the other parts of the World Ocean.
The second point of my proposition is, making an atlas of undersea features, which would contain different types of maps, as followes:
First: maps showing the right and bad solutions of the interpretation of measuring lines. Of course all of you know that the sea-beam or side-looking-sonar method gives an areal picture at the see bottom; but now we have only a little part of the whole sea-floor measured by these methods. First of all we have measuring lines. Sometimes the distanse between them is over one hundred even one thousand miles, sometimes about ten miles only. Have you ever compiled an isoline map having only ten mile sections or network? Try to do it once! You see, that is the point where the knowledge of plate tectonics comes into map-compilation. On nautical charts it is very important to show the exact depth of the points of sea bottom, on small-scale geographical maps it is important to show a good, global picture of the sea-floor to show the main structure of it.
The next type of the sheets in the atlas would be large-scale maps to get to know the formes of different undersea features, as seamounts, tablemounts, canyons and so on.
The third type of maps compare landforms and undersea features as volcanoes and seamounts; canyons or basins both on the land and on the sea-floor.
The last type of maps shows the same areas on different scale maps helping the „know how” of the generalization.
The atlas would be useful both to cartographers in their practice, and to students studying earth sciences at universities or high schools; to geologists, geophysicists, geographers, morphologists and so on.
I shall be pleased to show some examples to those, who are interested in my work after the lectures.
Thank you for your attention!