Thousands of new mountains have been found in the seafloor by scientists.

The seamounts or underwater volcanoes were revealed as part of a new ocean floor-mapping project conducted by researchers at California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and other organizations. The researchers said that the project also helped in finding out how the continents were formed. The findings of the study were published today in the journal Science.

It is to be noted that the ocean floor has previously been studied but the latest study has provided more and better data, David Sandwell, lead paper author and an SIO geophysicist, told weather.com. "We used a completely different approach,"? he said.

For the study, the researchers analyzed information from the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite and NASA's Jason 1 satellite. Sandwell added that the satellites are not new but there use to look at the ocean floor is new. They are providing "much higher quality data but also a longer time period of measurement," he added.

According to a National Science Foundation news release the new data has been used by the researchers to create a map twice as accurate as the previous version, which was made nearly two decades ago.

The mapping of earthquakes was also done by Sandwell and colleagues and it allowed the researchers to find out a link between the two. "Most seamounts were once active volcanoes, and so are usually found near tectonically active plate boundaries, mid-ocean ridges and subducting zones," according to the news release.

The study offers a new tool with high-resolution visuals of a place which cannot be seen easily. It will "allow us to revisit unsolved questions and to pinpoint where to focus future exploratory work," Don Rice, program director of NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences, noted in the news release.