Abstract Starting from the issue of how mean sea level has come to represent, since the early nineteenth century, the most commonly adopted vertical datum, this paper reviews the inherent biases and limitations of attempting to measure the sea from individual locations tucked away in bays and inlets along the coast. It then delves into a history of the attempts made to move measurements away from continental shores, including efforts to collect water height data from the bottom of the sea and from remote islands. Finally, it provides a history of the shift from attempting to measure the level of water at coastal locations to estimating, instead, where water ought to be. To achieve this, the article focuses on early developments in gravimetry at sea as a tool to map more precisely the geoid and, thus, the oceans’ topography. The idea behind these developments was to obtain more accurate results and a more trustworthy geodetic framework by getting rid of the variability caused by relative movement of land and sea and by contextual topographical challenges. It was also an attempt to delocalize the data collection endeavour in order to focus on inferring and estimating average values. It was thought that increasing the degree of abstraction would enable an improved representation of the planet and its oceans.

中文翻译：

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在海上测量零：关于大地测量框架的离域和抽象

摘要 从平均海平面如何代表自 19 世纪初以来最常用的垂直基准的问题开始，本文回顾了试图从隐藏在海湾和海湾中的个别位置测量海面的固有偏差和局限性。沿岸的入口。然后，它深入探讨了将测量结果从大陆海岸移开的尝试历史，包括从海底和偏远岛屿收集水位高度数据的努力。最后，它提供了从试图测量沿海地区水位到估计水位的转变历史。为实现这一目标，本文重点介绍了海上重力测量的早期发展，将其作为一种更精确地绘制大地水准面以及海洋地形图的工具。这些发展背后的想法是通过摆脱由陆地和海洋的相对运动和环境地形挑战引起的可变性，获得更准确的结果和更值得信赖的大地测量框架。这也是一次尝试去本地化数据收集工作，以便专注于推断和估计平均值。人们认为，增加抽象程度将能够改善地球及其海洋的表现。