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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International expedition discovers gigantic volcanic eruption in the Arctic Ocean
http://www.idw-online.de/pages/de/news266954
Thousand of new volcanoes revealed beneath the waves
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12218-thousand-of-new-volcanoes-revealed-beneath-the-waves.html
Active submarine volcanoes found near Fiji
http://pda.physorg.com/_news133090473.html
Found: The hottest water on Earth
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14456
Deep sea volcano erupts off coast
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/glance/788007/deep-sea-volcano-erupts-off-coast Great pics
Does this help?
Carbon-based life form (16:41:15),
I can just see it coming: now that CO2 can’t be credibly blamed for global warming, the focus is shifting to the new trumped-up scare, methane. Unfortunately, methane has only a small fraction of the warming potential of CO2 due to its tiny concentration [only 1.7 ppmv, vs 388 ppmv for CO2]. And methane levels appear to have peaked, and are now declining.
Methane has always naturally outgassed. And 40 – 60 million bison no longer go thundering across the prairie, farting methane all the way. And termites alone emit huge amounts of methane.
In addition, there is no “consensus” about methane: click
Even the warming potential of methane is disputed in the peer reviewed litrichur: click
The problem for the climate alarmism industry is that they used CO2 to try and scare the public into paying enormous new taxes and much higher prices in an effort to establish a huge new layer of government bureaucracy. But it is becoming clear that CO2 warms so little that its effect can’t even be measured, so the alarmists need something else to scare folks with: click
Too bad they don’t investigate the hundreds of thousands of recently discovered undersea volcanoes to determine their emissions: click
But they can’t tax volcanoes. So methane it is. Because money and control are the real goals; science is just the cover.
ooops forgot this one and it’s a goodie.
Boiling Hot Water Found in Frigid Arctic Sea
..””Many miles inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found elusive vents of scalding liquid rising out of the seafloor at temperatures that are more than twice the boiling point of water.
The cluster of five hydrothermal vents, also called black smokers, were discovered farther north than any others previously identified. The vents, one of which towers four stories high, are located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Greenland and Norway, more than 120 miles farther north than other known vents. “”
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080724-black-smokers.html
Geeesh, core of the planet is starting to feel hot to me again, just when I thought some of those chambers were going to start closing and contracting when it stops being so ah fluid?
Methane?
How would the case for methane as a significant ghg be made? Its absorption spectrum coincides with water vapour which would totaly dominate it?
Smokey I myself have noticed a strong shift towards the “rising” sea levels in the last few weeks on the pro blogs.
You would think with all of these oceans warming up so quickly that the rate of evapouration would actually be lowering the sea levels….
:)~
I dunno about the Pacific-Antarctic ridge, but Bransfield Strait is right next to King George Island in the S. Shetlands, the home of 6 of the 46-some “Antarctic” stations considered by Steig 2009, that show much more warming than the rest of the continent.
smokey –
thanx for the methane links and info
r.
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>>
One would think not. The gravitational force between two bodies is F=Gm1m2/r^2 where G is a constant, m1 and m2 are the masses, and r is the distance between them. The moon raises a tide on earth because the diameter of the earth is significant in comparison to the radius of the moon’s orbit, so water on the near side experiences more pull than water on the far side. But when we look at other planets like jupiter and saturn, the distance from them to the earth is so large in comparison to the diameter of the earth, that any difference in gravitational force from one side to the other would be tiny.
It would be “rotten” gravity!
I really enjoy these stories about real scientists, doing real science. Fascinating.
I have waited 2 months to see what our government would do with Global Warming in the budget. Here is the good news! Comments are worth reading as well.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/budget/budget-puts-climate-action-on-ice/article1490411/
You needed to include a terminating </a> after LinkText Here. Here’s how I explain it in full:
I’ve discovered, after a dozen failures, how to post clickable links using html tags – i.e., tags inside angle brackets. There are two things to learn: the html “skeleton,” and the two spots within the skeleton where the URL and its visible representation should be pasted. Here’s the skeleton with parentheses used in place of angle brackets:
(a href=””)(/a)
What you want to do is paste the actual URL in between the quotation marks. Then, between the two angle brackets >< you can either place the URL again (in which case that is what will be visible to the reader), or a human-language description of the URL.
If you find it hard to remember the skeleton, type it into a few Word files and copy and paste it into the comment box in the blog where you want to use it. Then copy and paste the URL (between the quotation marks). Then type in the description of the URL (between the angle brackets).
Like This?
I’m waiting for Al Gore to call for cap & trade on Helium3! If it’s rare, he’ll figure that he could make even MORE money than with CO2!
”””’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.”””’
Being an old nuclear fission power industry guy, my eyes light up when I see any terrestrial reference to sources of Helium-3 [He3].
But alas, at this stage of our technical development, it does not yet appear feasible to use this terrestrial source of He3 for the quantities needed for significant commercial fusion power use. Looks like would need go to non-terrestrial sources.
I am referring to the potential for development of commercial nuclear fusion power plants fueled with He3. It is a long term vision given that sustained [enough for power use] fusion reactions have not proven viable YET, but our technology is expected to continually expect . . . . unless, as we fear, CAGW driven agendas shutdown our economies which are really the source of government research funds.
John
Errata Notice
Regarding my comment “John Whitman (21:33:21)” above, I apologize for the last sentence. Got too impatient with my iterations of spell-check, proofread, edit, spell-check, etc. There was one too many “expect” based words in that sentence.
The last sentence in my previous comment should read;
“It is a long term vision given that sustained [enough for power use] fusion reactions have not proven viable YET, but our technology is expected to continually inprove. . . . unless, as we fear, CAGW driven agendas shutdown our economies which are really the source of government research funds.”
John
””’CRS, Dr.P.H. (21:20:24) : I’m waiting for Al Gore to call for cap & trade on Helium3! If it’s rare, he’ll figure that he could make even MORE money than with CO2!”””’
CRS,
Hey, we both had the He3 thoughts within minutes of each other!
Do we have the same type of cars too?
Do you have nuclear research/power background?
John
Fascinating!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Deception Island….still smoking…still seismically active…significant fumaroles…risk of eruption-medium..part of the Bransfield Strait. Historical references (mainly Norwegian Whalers) report seeing the entire Island on fire, obviously multiple eruptions taking place…..even today, during the austral winter within the caldera there are parts of the island where bedrock is exposed, no snow can be seen as the fumaroles are heating the surrounding areas, Kroner lake, beside Whalers Bay is an example.
Link to interesting webpage…
http://www.deceptionisland.aq/
Recently I made a sweep of GMF circling Antarctica at 60 degree South. If the GMF changes are caused by movements in the Earth’s mantle, than something odd is going on in the area of South Orkney Islands (60S,40W, see map)
http://kyleabaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/wallpaper-world-map-2006-large.gif
where the GMF has lost half of its value during the last 400 years. In contrast on the opposite side (60S,130E) facing Australia the GMF stayed absolutely constant since 1600.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC12.htm
Also global GMF sweep on http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
Data from The Institute of Geophysics, Zurich.
Always nice to see news of hydrothermal venting areas, especially reports of methane being outgassed. Of course, within feet of the vent this methane will likely deposit as clathrates, as the temperature drops from 400 deg C to 2 deg C over thsi distance from the plume, so the actual detection of gaseous methane ought to indicate the production of huge quantities.
And posters will know that at those pressure depths, and at those temperatures, water is well supercritical ( hence my tag) and becomes the universal solvent.
So here is a chemical speculation; that in those vent systems percolating H2O and CO2 might combine to form methane, and that the catalyst may well be some combination of sulphur, iron, manganese and other metals.
And if so, could this be how nature produces those huge natural gas and oilfields? By recycling CO2? Could we do the same by lowering CO2 to those depths and then hoisting it back up as natural gas?
Lie of the land, please Anthony. Your English………….
or were you suggesting that oolitic limestone is volcanic?
“I should point out that this discovery on the Pacific Antarctic Ridge is 2800 miles from tip of the Antarctic peninsula”
Oh, don’t get too wrapped up about that, pass it over to Eric Steig, I’m sure he & Mickey Mann can smear the heating around far enough!
😉
Off topic but relevant to oceans and of intrest to new twisting of data to conform to CAGW is this short article from Scipps Institute of Oceanography.
I recieve the “email letter from S.I.O. (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) and over time I have noticed how research results are now instantly assumed to be a result of global warming. The recent article, “Argo: World’s Hydrological Cycle is accelerating” was a typical example, and the appeal to justify funding was obvious. I have loved SIO since I was a child growing up in San Diego in the 60s and 70s. It is a shame how much CAGW has politicized research. Here is a short summary of the article with some questions, comments…
“Dean Roemmich, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and an Argo steering committee member, co-authored a 2009 paper reporting an initial finding of changes in ocean surface salinity. Now colleagues at other major research centers are adding quantitative detail.”
Ouestion; I know this article is a summary, but how could there be an intial conclusion of changes without quanative detail?
“As water warms, it evaporates faster and escapes into the atmosphere. The atmosphere cannot hold water for long and releases it as rain and snow. Salinity maps generated by Argo show the ocean regions in which the water is evaporating most rapidly and the others where it is being redeposited on the surface as salt-free rainwater.”
OK, so ARGO was used for this study from 2004 – 2008, and as ARGO is new, there were not rapid changes measured by ARGO, especially considereing ARGO has recorded no warming over this same period. The measurements for this study are on the surface where the hydrologic cycle happens. As the time measured is so short, and considering we have no decent history of prior changes, what was the study compared to?
“This is the most compelling information there is that the global process of evaporation and precipitation has sped up,” said Roemmich. “There’s little ambiguity in the data. Prior to Argo these changes were suspected, but there just wasn’t enough salinity data to map the global pattern.”
So again, if “there just wasn’t enough salinity data to map the global pattern” prior to ARGO, how to we know it has speed up, and if it has, how do we know it is not a natural change? The direct answer is found in the following paragraph…
“An upcoming paper by Durack and Susan Wijffels finds that model estimates of ocean salinity patterns reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report underestimate the strength of the patterns when compared to the salinity profiles made by the Argo network and preceding efforts. Their previous paper describing the quantitative analysis of the global ocean salinity changes has been submitted to the Journal of Climate, and a second analysis of Argo salinity has been published in Japan’s Journal of Oceanography by Shigecki Hosoda and colleagues of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.”
So the speed up is relative to the models prediction as well as past undetailed observations? Wow, just wow. Next comes the appeal to justify the funding…
“Clearly, if we’re able to get a better estimate of changes to the 80 percent of global freshwater fluxes over the 20th century, we can much better validate global climate models and start to narrow the wide uncertainty ranges associated with hydrological cycle changes both in the past and the future,” Durack said”.
Why the trying to “validate” global climate models”? Should the goal be equally to invalidate the “models” if this is what the data shows? If the uncertainty factors were so large, how do we really know what happened before ARGO, and if the pattern has sped up, how do we know this is not a natural cycle, since there was no ocean warming over the period studied? Such an appeal to more funding was unintentionaly betrayed in the opening paragraph of this article “…The Argo network of ocean-observing sensors is expected to pay its biggest dividends to climate researchers…”. The Argo system is a wonderful benefit to science, but I would feel better if CAGW was not used to justify the research, as it corrupts science. IMV It would be better if science progressed slower, but more honestly.
vukcevic (00:46:06) :
Recently I made a sweep of GMF circling Antarctica at 60 degree South. If the GMF changes are caused by movements in the Earth’s mantle, than something odd is going on in the area of South Orkney Islands (60S,40W, see map)
http://kyleabaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/wallpaper-world-map-2006-large.gif
where the GMF has lost half of its value during the last 400 years. In contrast on the opposite side (60S,130E) facing Australia the GMF stayed absolutely constant since 1600.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC12.htm
Also global GMF sweep on http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
Data from The Institute of Geophysics, Zurich.
~
“..on the opposite side (60S,130E) facing Australia the GMF stayed absolutely constant since 1600..”
Isn’t the Australian plate the fastest moving plate on the planet, and opposite the South Atlantic Anamoly, too?
The below article was an eye popper for me. The realization that so many volacanoes and smokers are beneath the oceans. Helped me to wrap my head around the extent of it.
Thousand of new volcanoes revealed beneath the waves
The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.
The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes, 39,000 of which rise more than 1000 metres over the sea bed.
“The distribution of underwater volcanoes tells us something about what is happening in the centre of the Earth,” says John Hillier of the University of Cambridge in the UK. That is because they give information about the flows of hot rock in the mantle beneath. “But the problem is that we cannot see through the water to count them,” he says.
Satellites can detect volcanoes that are more than 1500 m high because the mass of the submerged mountains causes gravity to pull the water in around them. This creates domes on the ocean’s surface that can be several metres high and can be detected from space…………………………………………………..
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12218-thousand-of-new-volcanoes-revealed-beneath-the-waves.html
Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2007GL029874)