Given this revelation, I expect someone to argue soon that this climate monitoring station in Tremonton, Utah is in a natural environment. 😉
From the University of California, Santa Barbara
Scientists discover underwater asphalt volcanoes
Impressive landmarks hidden for 40,000 years rise from sea-floor.
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(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– About 10 miles off the Santa Barbara coast, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel, a series of impressive landmarks rise from the sea floor. They’ve been there for about 40,000 years, but they’ve remained hidden in the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean –– until now
UC Santa Barbara scientists, working with colleagues from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), UC Davis, University of Sydney, and University of Rhode Island, say that they have identified a series of asphalt volcanoes on the floor of the Santa Barbara Channel. The largest of these undersea Ice Age domes is at a depth of 700 feet (220 meters) –– much too deep for scuba diving –– which explains why the volcanoes have never been spotted by humans.
“It’s larger than a football field long and as tall as a six-story building,” said David Valentine, professor of earth science at UCSB and the lead author of a National Science Foundation-funded study published online this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. “It’s a massive feature, completely made out of asphalt.”
Chris Reddy, director of the Coastal Ocean Institute at WHOI and a co-author of the study, has studied oil spills his whole career. “These volcanoes are an astonishing display of nature,” Reddy said. “And they underscore one little-known fact: Half of the oil that enters the coastal environment is from natural oil seeps like the ones off the coast of California.”
Valentine, Reddy, and their colleagues first viewed the volcanoes during a 2007 dive on the research submarine Alvin, though Valentine credits Ed Keller, professor of earth science at UCSB, with guiding them to the site. “Ed had looked at some bathymetry (sea floor topography) studies conducted in the 1990’s and noted some very unusual features,” Valentine said.
Based on Keller’s research, Valentine and other scientists took Alvin into the area in 2007 and located the mystery features. Using the sub’s robotic arm, the researchers broke off samples and brought them to labs at UCSB and WHOI for testing. In 2009, Valentine and colleagues made two more dives to the area in Alvin and also did a detailed survey of the area using an autonomous underwater vehicle, Sentry, which takes photos as it glides about nine feet above the ocean floor.
“When you fly Sentry over the sea floor, you can see all of the cracking of the asphalt and flow features,” Valentine said. “You can see all of the textures of a flowing liquid that solidified in place. That’s one of the reasons we’re calling them volcanoes, because they have so many features that are indicative of a lava flow.”
But tests showed that these aren’t your typical lava volcanoes found in Hawaii and elsewhere around the Pacific Rim. Using a mass spectrometer, carbon dating, microscopic fossils, and comprehensive, two-dimensional gas chromatography, the scientists determined that these are asphalt and were formed when petroleum was flowing from the floor of the channel about 30,000-40,000 years ago.
The researchers also determined that the volcanoes were at one time a prolific source of methane, a greenhouse gas. The two largest volcanoes are about a kilometer apart and have pits or depressions surrounding them. These pits, according to Valentine, are signs of “methane gas bubbling from the subsurface.” That’s not surprising, Valentine said, considering how much petroleum was flowing. “They were spewing out a lot of petroleum, but also lots of natural gas,” he said, “which you tend to get when you have petroleum seepage in this area.”
The discovery that vast amounts of methane once emanated from the volcanoes caused the scientists to wonder if there might have been an environmental impact on the area during the Ice Age. Valentine found two high-profile studies, one in the journal Science and the other in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which examined events from that time, including a period in which water in the channel became anoxic. “It became a dead zone,” Valentine said. “We’re hypothesizing that these features may have been a major contributor to those events.”
While the volcanoes have been dormant for thousands of years, the 2009 Alvin dive revealed a few spots where gas was still bubbling. “We think it’s residual gas,” said Valentine, who added that the amount of gas is so small that it is harmless because it never reaches the surface.
Other co-authors of this study are Christopher Farwell, Sarah C. Bagby, Brian A. Clark, and Morgan Soloway, all from UCSB; Robert K. Nelson, Dana Yoerger, and Richard Camilli, from WHOI; Tessa M. Hill, UC Davis; Oscar Pizarro, University of Sydney; and Christopher N. Roman, University of Rhode Island.
Credit: Dana Yoerger
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Having seen this article, the thought occurs that if humans didn’t drill for oil it would leak out and pollute the environment anyway.
Well at grazing incidence that a***fault looks pretty much like ice does; so it is just another component of polar albedo.
But I can see the resemblance Anthony; that owl box location looks like it was copied from teh one at ASU outside the Environmental Science building; they had an asphalt reference surface as well.
Monkey see; Monkee do !!
Someone contact Erich von Däniken – “Parking Lots of the Gods!”
I want to be a bit serious. Do we know of a greenfield site that will have a factory/military base built around it?
Could we not persuade some one to have a pair of thermometers in screen placed in and outside the projected building site and then monitor the change in temperatures during construction and afterward and nail this UHI for good.
The work you folks have done exposing these ridiculous weather stations is fantastic. I have recently come across something which may be of interest to you. The organization is NEON, found at
http://www.neoninc.org/
Here’s a little breakdown ( http://www.neoninc.org/about/overview ) of their goal:
NEON has partitioned the U. S. into 20 ecoclimatic domains, each of which represents different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance. Data will be collected from strategically selected sites within each domain and synthesized into information products that can be used to describe changes in the nation’s ecosystem through space and time.
The data NEON collects and provides will focus on how land use, climate change and invasive species affect biodiversity, disease ecology, and ecosystem services. Obtaining integrated data on these relationships over a long-term period is crucial to improving forecast models and resource management for environmental change.
These data and information products will be readily available to scientists, educators, students, decision makers, and the public. This will allow a wide audience, including members of underserved communities, to use NEON tools to understand and address ecological questions and issues. The NEON infrastructure is a means of enabling transformational science and promoting broad ecological literacy.
Does this sound rather odd to you? As if these folks will now be the wholesalers for data we can all use to get results needed by someone for something – who? What? No need for scientists to get their own data here, NEON will do it for you – from ‘select sites’. Why does this sound so similar to what happened with Climategate and the weather station mess you folks exposed.
Anyway, thought you and your readers would be interested.
A new debate is forming… which is the worst for the environment… Natural Asphalt or Anthropogenic Asphalt?
Robert A. Heinlein once noted it always seemed odd to him that when a beaver makes a dam for a beaver’s purposes that’s considered “nature”, but when a man does something similar for a man’s purposes, somehow it becomes “unnatural”.
Seriously. Is that Utah weather station a joke? Are its readings actually included in any data set?
And aren’t the oil sands of Alberta sort of like asphalt? They have been leaking into that ecosystem since the ice melted, and before the ice was there. There have been nonstop scary stories about them, all of them either grossly exaggerated or just plain false. But they are such a huge potential cash cow that the greens are extorting as much as they can from them.
Black Sabbath – What you describe is the more integration between the pseudoscience driving the AGW story and the pseudoscience called Conservation Biology. The EPA is the vortex of this junk in the US, of course.
REPLY: Sadly, it is real, and part of NCDC’s data set. -A
Wow! When can we begin mining it?
Thanks for the comment, Al Gored!
La Brea Tar Pits Submerged.
Wonder if there are any fossils trapped therein?
@Bill Sticker “the thought occurs that if humans didn’t drill for oil it would leak out and pollute the environment anyway”
———–
Nonsense. If it leaks out naturally, it isn’t pollution; it *is* the environment.
Asphalt under the sea?
Maybe Cthulhu is sleeping there?
Bill Sticker (16:26:46) :
Of course it does. You don’t think the earth’s mantle is hermetically sealed like Tupperware, do you?
These volcanoes sound very interesting and unique ,but I think there is a more vital issue that should concern us more.
. Volcanic records for the last 10,000 years for the entire globe shows that there have been about 56 eruptions of level 6[VEI] and higher including 6 eruptions at level 7 and another 4 at level+6.The records also shows that you can have level 6 eruptions of two per year, 2 in 10 years, two per 35 years and so on.
The area that I am most concerned about is the North West Pacific rim, namely the Kamchatka Peninsula and specifically Kurile Lake caldera area which is at the very southern tip of the Peninsula. There are about 300 volcanoes in this general area of which about 28 are active. There have been about 100 eruptions on Kamchatka during the last 10,000 years. Kurile Lake erupted last 6440 BC at a level 7 and was the largest Holocene eruption in the area and ranked with eruptions like Tambora [Indonesia] and Crater lake[US] both at level 7 also. The entire Pacific plate which has been quite active recently is pushing under the Eurasian plate and there is a pinch point in this area . This is a subduction type of an area .Kurile Island area immediately south has had 12 eruptions mostly level 4 since about 1800. There has not been an eruption on Kamchatka of level 6 since 240 AD and prior to that it was in 5700 BC. There were 8 eruptions of level 4 and higher during the past Century. The last one was in 2001.
I see this region as a high risk area currently. Level 5-7 eruption may happen here any time and not necessarily detectable until it blows or becomes more active. I may be the only one flagging this area at this time but I feel that this may be much bigger than the Icelandic eruption and deserves more attention .
OT: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63O1NJ20100426
Giant ocean “conveyor belt” [discovery]
“Imagine 40 Amazon Rivers flowing rapidly together, acting like a global conveyor belt. That’s what scientists have found deep in the ocean near Antarctica.”
Note: they managed to tie the story to Climate Change and ocean acidity.
We know so very little but some won’t allow that to interrupt their view that they understand it all.
This just in: Ice Age 7-11 also found embedded in undersea asphalt along with several Flintstone-type vehicles.
geo (16:47:10) :
“In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the ‘Naturist’ reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
“Shub Niggurath (17:09:47) :
Asphalt under the sea?
Maybe Cthulhu is sleeping there?”
Oh, R’lyeh?
OT but Australia dumps ETS / cap and trade for at least 3 years to avoid the political ramifications.
Goes from being “greatest moral challenge of our time” to “nothing to see here move along”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/27/2883282.htm?
All over the radio and TV here
OT
Youtube have been hard at work. ALL the hitler on global warming voice overs taking skeptic point of view have been banned by youtube. They cite copyright infringement. But all the AGW ones have been left alone. Skeptic hitler vids had much higher hits rates, but now a search for hitler global warming only brings up AGW point of view. Also they’ve completely left alone hitler voice overs that have nothing to do with GW, of which there are many.
This is the only relavent vid that comes up now ( AGW point of view)
Got a lot of hits, but now they’ve banned it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGdbHW9Nlds
‘All your base are belong to us’ one is still here!
bubbagyro (17:09:59) :
Of course not. Everything leaks. Eventually. I merely meant that if oil is going to leak out anyway, controlling where and when oil leaks from the Earths crust by drilling is not such a bad idea, environmentally speaking.
Funny how a tiny fraction of a bit of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 will kill us but the stuff coming out of those vents is harmless.
Al Gored (16:53:52) :
I worked on a huge Tar sands project in the late 70’s and fished in the Athabasca river since there was little else to do in Fort McMurray. The banks of the river were totally covered with a tar like substance that obvously leaks into the river. I think it is essentially a form of asphalt mixed with lots of sand.
The Canadian folks call the tar substance Bitumen when it was being processed. It appears that the tarlike substance can have a range of viscosity and in fort Mcmurray it was viscous enough to be mined with mechanical means along with the sands. The plant I worked on now produces 425,000 barrrels of synthetic crude/day. There are 42 gallons in a barrel.
An interesting fact about the Syncrude tar sands is that the sand does not fit back into the hole in the mine after removal of the bitumen since the mixture is more tightly packed with the lubrication of the tar and the volume has increased.
It is claimed that the oil reserves of the Alberta tar sands is on the order of Saudi Arabia. This is a major source of gas and diesel that significantly postpones the peak oil claims. One big problem, Pelosi wants to ban the use of synthetic crude from the canadian tar sands in the US and the Chinese are moving in to take the product. Her concept is suicidial to our economy since the largest provider of imported oil to the US is our friends in Canada.