The title is from Columbia, and I should point out that this discovery on the Pacific Antarctic Ridge is 2800 miles from tip of the Antarctic peninsula, where volcanic activity is already well known. Examples are found at Deception Island and within the Bransfield strait. These two images I’ve prepared below (click to enlarge them) will give you a “lay of the land” so to speak.
I think it would be illuminating to send ROV’s under some of the newly opened sea surface that was exposed when sea ice near the peninsula broke off to see if vents exist there also.
========================================================
Discovery, a First, Could Spur Exploration of Distant Mid-Ocean Ridge
From a Columbia University press release:
Scientists at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have found evidence of hydrothermal vents on the seafloor near Antarctica, formerly a blank spot on the map for researchers wanting to learn more about seafloor formation and the bizarre life forms drawn to these extreme environments.
Hydrothermal vents spew volcanically heated seawater from the planet’s underwater mountain ranges—the vast mid-ocean ridge system, where lava erupts and new crust forms. Chemicals dissolved in those vents influence ocean chemistry and sustain a complex web of organisms, much as sunlight does on land. In recent decades more than 220 vents have been discovered worldwide, but so far no one has looked for them in the rough and frigid waters off Antarctica.
From her lab in Palisades, N.Y., geochemist Gisela Winckler recently took up the search. By analyzing thousands of oceanographic measurements, she and her Lamont colleagues pinpointed six spots on the remote Pacific Antarctic Ridge, about 2,000 miles from New Zealand, the closest inhabited country, and 1,000 miles from the west coast of Antarctica, where they think vents are likely to be found. The sites are described in a paper published THIS WEEK in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“Most of the deep ocean is like a desert, but these vents are oases of life and weirdness,” said Winckler. “The Pacific Antarctic ridge is one of the ridges we know least about. It would be fantastic if researchers were to dive to the seafloor to study the vents we believe are there.”
Two important facts helped the scientists isolate the hidden vents. First, the ocean is stratified with layers of lighter water sitting on top of layers of denser water. Second, when a seafloor vent erupts, it spews gases rich in rare helium-3, an isotope found in earth’s mantle and in the magma bubbling below the vent. As helium-3 disperses through the ocean, it mixes into a density layer and stays there, forming a plume that can stretch over thousands of kilometers.
The Lamont scientists were analyzing ocean-helium measurements to study how the deep ocean exchanges dissolved gases with the atmosphere when they came across a helium plume that looked out of place. It was in a southern portion of the Pacific Ocean, below a large and well-known helium plume coming off the East Pacific Rise, one of the best-studied vent regions on earth. But this mystery plume appeared too deep to have the same source.
Suspecting that it was coming from the Pacific Antarctic Ridge instead, the researchers compiled a detailed map of ocean-density layers in that region, using some 25,000 salinity, temperature and depth measurements. After locating the helium plume along a single density layer, they compared the layer to topographic maps of the Pacific Antarctic Ridge to figure out where the plume would intersect.
The sites they identified cover 340 miles of ridge line–the approximate distance between Manhattan and Richmond, Va.–or about 7 percent of the total 4,300 mile-ridge. This chain of volcanic mountains lies about three miles below the ocean surface, and its mile-high peaks are cut by steep canyons and fracture zones created as the sea floor spreads apart. It is a cold and lonely stretch of ocean, far from land or commercial shipping lanes.
“They haven’t found vents, but they’ve narrowed the places to look by quite a bit,” said Edward Baker, a vent expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Of course, finding vents in polar waters is not easy, even with a rough idea where to look. In 2007, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution geophysicist Rob Reves-Sohn led a team of scientists to the Gakkel Ridge between Greenland and Siberia to look for vents detected six years earlier. Although they discovered regions where warm fluids appeared to be seeping from the seafloor, they failed to find the high-temperature, black smoker vents they had come for. In a pending paper, Sohn now says he has narrowed down the search to a 400-kilometer-square area where he expects to find seven new vents, including at least one black smoker.
The search for vents off Antarctica may be equally unpredictable, but the map produced by the Lamont scientists should greatly improve the odds of success, said Robert Newton, a Lamont oceanographer and study co-author. “You don’t have to land right on top of a vent to know it’s there,” he said. “You get a rich mineral soup coming out of these smokers—methane, iron, manganese, sulphur and many other minerals. Once you get within a few tens of kilometers, you can detect these other tracers.”
Since the discovery of the first hydrothermal vents in the late 1970s, scientists have searched for far-flung sites, in the hunt for new species and adaptive patterns that can shed light on how species evolved in different spots. Cindy Van Dover, a deep sea biologist and director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory, says she expects that new species will be found on the Pacific Antarctic Ridge, and that this region may hold important clues about how creatures vary between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, on either end.
“These vents are living laboratories,” said Van Dover, who was not involved in the study. “When we went to the Indian Ocean, we discovered the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail whose foot is covered in armor made of iron sulfides. The military may be interested in studying the snail to develop a better armor. The adaptations found in these animals may have many other applications.”
Other study authors include Peter Schlosser, head of Lamont’s Environmental Tracer Group and Lamont marine geologist Timothy Crone.
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Even more evidence of volcanic activity in Antarctica.
Active volcanism beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet and implications for ice-sheet stability
(Nature, Volume 361, Number 6412, p. 526-529, February 1993)
– Donald D. Blankenship et al.
Aeromagnetic evidence for a volcanic caldera(?) Complex beneath the divide of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
(Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 25, Issue 23, pp. 4385-4388, December 1998)
– John C. Behrendt et al.
Ice-dynamical constraints on the existence and impact of subglacial volcanism on West Antarctic ice sheet stability
(Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 33, Issue 23, December 2006)
– Stefan W. Vogel et al.
Isn’t February 2010 the coldest for the USA since 1979?
Hot water melts ice, right? RIGHT!?!?!
“Since the discovery of the first hydrothermal vents in the late 1970s”
The thing that gets me is, they were ONLY discovered in the 1970s… What else hasn’t been discovered about Planet “A” ?
From the article: “Second, when a seafloor vent erupts, it spews gases rich in rare helium-3, an isotope found in earth’s mantle and in the magma bubbling below the vent.”
Uh, should we now be concerned about this rapid “heliumization” of the oceans? I mean, it doesn’t seem threatening, but there’s so much we don’t know… Maybe I should ask a celebrity?
Of course! and there are also thermal pools. No news.The antartic peninsula it is the prolongation of the andes mountains chain, the most active and most abundant volcano chain. Last earthquake was there, remember last sunday´s 8.8 richter scale?
Looks like when in a solar minimum the magnetic embrace from the sun looses and the earth tectonic plates begin to move more freely (“with freedom from exterior control”).
I wonder if they could divert some of the billions they spend on the hoax to search for the truth. It would be good science.
Van Grungy: “Hot water melts ice, right? RIGHT!?!?!”
These vents are three miles down and surrounded by a LOT of cold water. I doubt that the heat they supply warms the ocean significantly, just as the heat emitted by active but quiescent volcanoes does not significantly warm the atmosphere. Of course when they erupt it would be a very different story. But these vents are usually surrounded by life evolved specifically to survive there, which means they have been stable and quiescent for a very long time.
Yes hot water melts ice. But there isn’t much ice three miles down (Ice floats, right? RIGHT!?!?!). And by the time you get to the surface you would hardly be able to detect the amount of heating, let alone melt ice with it.
I think I remember reading about one of the moons of Jupiter or was it Saturn…?
The particular moon’s surface had cracks and fissures and lava flows. Astronomers speculated that the cracks and fissures and lava flows were from multiple giant “earth” quakes that resulted from extreme tidal forces from the other moons and the giant planet. The friction from the tidal forces melted the rock to create lava that flowed from the cracks that the “earth” quakes made.
It makes me wonder if the earth can experience an increase in tidal forces from particular configurations of planets and whether it can affect the weather, i.e., more lava flows or volcanic eruptions, more thermal sea vents, more earth quakes.
“Apparent” vents at “Deception” Island ? “”” and 1,000 miles from the west coast of Antarctica, where they think vents are likely to be found. “””
So they think they may have found some likely sites for hydrothermal vents; which is why they don’t have any pictures of any hydothermal vents within 1000 miles of Antarctica.
Film at 11.
And now for something completely <a href="different“>LinkText Here… at the other end of the earth, anyway.
(Sorry I couldn’t get the link right)
This article says that the level of methane in the Arctic Ocean was “more than expected”… I guess that means because we are ignorant of the true level of emissions, we should be alarmed when we discover them. Or maybe it means this level is normal, and the climate isn’t as sensitive “as expected”.
It looks as if the Pacific Oceanic ridge is located 2800 miles west of the tip of West Antarctica at about 55 Degrees S. It may help others if this was included in the first sentence.
Gotta love real science – thanks for the interesting post!
The PAR is off the ‘ring of fire’ http://www.risingsunofnihon.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/ring-of-fire.gif but is on the Pacific/Antarctic plate boundary, so that narrows down the places to look. Just track the plate boundaries until the research money stops :).
Interesting stuff, it becomes a land of fire and ice.
O/T but interesting – I see there are 50 ships stuck in ice in the Baltic:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/50-ships-stuck-in-ice-20100305-pmbi.html
They say they haven’t seen this many ships stuck in ice since the mid-1980s.
“Most of the deep ocean is like a desert, but these vents are oases of life and weirdness,” said Winckler.
One thing to point out to people who may still be on the fence: there is NO place on earth too hot for plant life (don’t even think, “desert”, add water and plants have no problem regardless of the heat). OTOH, there are plenty of places too cold to support plant life. Warm is good, cold is bad.
Gotta stop these things before they acidify the oceans and kill all the marine life..
Anthony
In an attempt to be informed, I regularly access your website. the previous thread seemed to become suddenly infected with acrimony and way OT
Thank you for promptly closing it. Perhaps you could more prominently remind participants of the need to be civil.
Here we have thousands of underwater volcanoes spewing toxins and heavy metals into the water column…. and the EPA goes spare over vessels pumping their bilges in the open ocean….. Misanthopic scumbags.
I posted on this a year ago. With the ring of fire and the PDO, it is easy for warmer water to enter the arctic. Not so with the Antarctic. It isn’t over water.
Gavin and Romm among others blog about northern melting but are unwilling and unable to consider currents of warmer water.
does anyone have NYT 5 march to check if the correction was made in the printed version?
4 March: NYT: Cornelia Dean: Study Says Undersea Release of Methane Is Under Way
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.
She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.) By some estimates, global methane emissions total about 500 teragrams a year….
Correction: March 4, 2010
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to a teragram being 1.1 billion tons. It is 1.1 million tons. The version also incorrectly said that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is east of the Bering Strait. It is west of the Bering Strait.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 5, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/science/earth/05methane.html
reason i ask is, doesn’t this 1.1 billion refer to the same thing that was corrected above?
5 March: UK Times: Methane frozen beneath Arctic seabed destabilising, scientists warn
by Frank Pope, Ocean Correspondent
They found that almost seven teragrams of methane, each equivalent to 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon, were being released every year from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. A similar figure had previously been estimated to be the total for all world oceans.
“This is a little alarming,” said Dr Shakhova. “We do not know how massive or sudden this outburst was
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7050312.ece
Public release date: 4-Mar-2010
National Science Foundation
Contact: Dana Cruikshank
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova..
Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons…
Methane releases from Arctic shelf may be much larger and faster than anticipated
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/nsf-mrf030410.php
(LOL) 4 March: Time: Going Green
More Warming Worries: Methane from the Arctic
By Michael D. Lemonick
Lemonick is the senior science writer at Climate Central
A string of ‘gates over the past few months — Climategate, Himalayagate, among others — have landed some hard punches on the politics of climate change science. They haven’t laid a glove on the science itself, however. ..
…methane, a greenhouse gas that is 30 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, is bubbling up from the continental shelf and leaking into the atmosphere. The estimated total: 8 teragrams — that’s 8 trillion grams — per year..
Eight teragrams of anything, let alone a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, sounds dangerous, but as Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, points out, the newly discovered methane leak represents a small piece of the overall global total of methane emissions — about 500 teragrams annually — from wetlands, termites and agriculture (including belching cows, rotting manure and rice paddies).
The number itself isn’t what worries people, though: it’s whether this newly identified methane source is part of an ominous trend…
The real value of this new report, he believes, is that it finally gives scientists a solid baseline against which they can measure changes in methane over the coming years to see if it really is increasing. It’s also a perfect example of how climate science actually works, as opposed to the cartoon version bandied about by activists and politicians: you take data, acknowledge any uncertainties about exactly what it means, then go out and take more data to narrow those uncertainties. That’s exactly why human-triggered global warming was widely acknowledged to be mostly theoretical a few decades ago — and why it’s considered a scientific fact today.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1969767,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-03/05/c_13198007.htm
maybe a ‘ring of fire’ under these ships might help.
regards
r (16:34:15) :
The particular moon’s surface had cracks and fissures and lava flows. Astronomers speculated that the cracks and fissures and lava flows were from multiple giant “earth” quakes that resulted from extreme tidal forces from the other moons and the giant planet. The friction from the tidal forces melted the rock to create lava that flowed from the cracks that the “earth” quakes made.
It makes me wonder if the earth can experience an increase in tidal forces from particular configurations of planets and whether it can affect the weather, i.e., more lava flows or volcanic eruptions, more thermal sea vents, more earth quakes.
Science believes that our core and planet were made from gravity and the moon slows the planet.
Incorrect!
Then why is there pressure build-up under the planets surfaces?
Why is the mass in magma or our planet’s mantle not pulled to the core by gravity?
ROTATION
Rotation when spinning moves density to the outer surface. What is left?
Massive amounts of gases. Supercompressed.
When compressed gases start to slow, they expand.
This is why we still have massive amounts of pressure build-up after billions of years.
Energy from rotation compresses mass. This in turn is slowly released as rotation slows.
Image of the scaly footed gastopod, which incorporates iron in the outer layer of its unusual three-layer shell, which is built to withstand the pressure, or crushing force of crab claws:
http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/hp_005.jpg
Who wudda thunk it? This marble is a lot more complicated than Al Gore told us. I am in shock….