Telegraph Plateau

The Telegraph Plateau is a region of the North Atlantic that was supposedly relatively flat and shallow compared to the rest of the ocean away from shore.

The feature was discovered by Matthew Fontaine Maury while producing a bathymetric chart of the ocean in 1853, compiled from sounding data from multiple ships' logs.

Maury had discarded many of the historic readings because he thought they were inaccurate due to the inability of the sounder to tell when the lead had contacted the bottom in deep ocean.

[12] The Victorian hydrographers failed to detect the presence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge due to the widely spaced soundings taken along the proposed cable route.

The crossing is in the Charlie-Gibbs fracture zone between the Minia Seamount Mountains to the north and the volcanic Faraday Hills to the south.