This from PhysOrg:

Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic. An international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, has for the first time succeeded in creating a digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) for the first time shows the detailed topography of the seafloor for the entire area south of 60°S. An article presented to the scientific world by IBCSO has now appeared online in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The IBCSO data grid and the corresponding Antarctic chart will soon be freely available in the internet and are intended to help scientists amongst others to better understand and predict sea currents, geological processes or the behaviour of marine life.

The new bathymetric chart of the Southern Ocean is an excellent example of what scientists can achieve if researchers from around the world work across borders. “For our IBCSO data grid, scientists from 15 countries and over 30 research institutions brought together their bathymetric data from nautical expeditions. We were ultimately able to work with a data set comprising some 4.2 billion individual values”, explains IBCSO editor Jan Erik Arndt, bathymetric expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-entire-topography-antarctic-seafloor.html

Click to view full-size version.

I am very curious about this book. I have just learned about Ibn Khaldun through wikipedia and he is perhaps best known for this and the series it is part of. Seems it is probably the first attempt at a Philosophy of History. It also recounts much of the history of the Middle East and delves into many fields, like economics, sociology, and religion. If you want to preview or read it online, please click on the cover photo.

I will of course post a review and continue to add quotes to my quotes page as I get into it.
(At this point I have yet to order it, but hope to very soon!)
– 84adam, Mar. 3, 2013

I’m such a Foundation (Asimov) nerd that I had to post this when I found out that a town in Turkey was actually named “with/of Foundation” i.e. Foundational = Vakıflı. Here is a clip of the wikipedia entry on it. Apparently the only remaining Armenian village in Turkey.