From the Max Planck Society
New deep-sea hot springs discovered in the Atlantic
Scientists from the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen on board the German research vessel Meteor have discovered a new hydrothermal vent 500 kilometres south-west of the Azores. The vent with chimneys as high as one meter and fluids with temperatures up to 300 degrees Celsius was found at one thousand metres water depth in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of the new deep-sea vent is remarkable because the area in which it was found has been intensively studied during previous research cruises. The MARUM and Max Planck researchers describe their discovery in their video blog.
Chimney-like structures spew hot fluids of up to 300 degrees Celsius that contain large amounts of methane and hydrogen sulfide.
Image: MARUM
The Bremen scientists were able to find the hydrothermal vent by using the new, latest-generation multibeam echosounder on board the research vessel Meteor that allows the imaging of the water column above the ocean floor with previously unattained precision. The scientists saw a plume of gas bubbles in the water column at a site about 5 kilometers away from the known large vent field Menez Gwen that they were working on. A dive with the remote-controlled submarine MARUM-QUEST revealed the new hydrothermal site with smokers and animals typically found at vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Since the discovery of the new vent, the scientists have been intensively searching the water column with the multibeam echosounder. To their astonishment, they have already found at least five other sites with gas plumes. Some even lie outside the volcanically active spreading zone in areas where hydrothermal activity was previously not assumed to occur.
“Our results indicate that many more of these small active sites exist along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge than previously assumed,” said Dr. Nicole Dubilier, the chief scientist of the expedition. “This could change our understanding of the contribution of hydrothermal activity to the thermal budget of the oceans. Our discovery is also exciting because it could provide the answer to a long standing mystery: We do not know how animals travel between the large hydrothermal vents, which are often separated by hundreds to thousands of kilometres from each other. They may be using these smaller sites as stepping stones for their dispersal.”
Research on deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Atlantic is the objective of the 30 marine scientists from Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel, Portugal, and France who have been on board the German research vessel Meteor since September 6th. The expedition to the submarine volcano Menez Gwen near the Azores is financed by MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences in Bremen. “One of the questions that the team would like to answer is why the hydrothermal sources in this area emit so much methane – a very potent greenhouse gas,” says chief scientist Nicole Dubilier, who is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Census of Marine Life Vents and Seeps project ChEss (Chemosynthetic Ecosystem Science). “Another important focus of the research is the deep-sea mussels that live at the hydrothermal vents and host symbiotic bacteria in their gills. The mussels obtain their nutrition from these bacteria.”
The hydrothermal vent crab Segonzacia on a mound that is covered with white bacteria and mineral precipitates.
Image: MARUM
Video blog: “News from the main deck”
An expedition on a research vessel is not only marked by great moments, like this discovery; everyday life on the Meteor is also filled with other exciting activities and events. Work on a research vessel goes on round the clock throughout the entire expedition. In his video podcast “Neues vom Peildeck / News from the observation deck”, available through the Hamburg-based newspaper Abendblatt, and in German and English on YouTube (see link below), Dennis Fink, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, reports on the activities of the ship’s remote-operated vehicle (ROV) MARUM-QUEST, the various instruments used by the scientists and life on board the ship. In the two-minute video blogs, Fink and his colleagues show fascinating images direct from the sea floor.
###
Contact:
Dr. Manfred Schlösser, Public Relations
Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen
Tel.: +49 421 2028704
E-mail: mschloes@mpi-bremen.de
Albert Gerdes, Public Relations
MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Research University of Bremen, Bremen
Tel.: +49 421 218-65540
E-mail: agerdes@marum.de
Why would it have stopped, that is like saying evolution was fun while it lasted?
Here are a few links to issues relevant to the topic:
In this one look at “heat flow” under the main heading of geothermal gradient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient
This one shows the opening of the Atlantic beginning about 200 my ago:
http://museum.gov.ns.ca/fossils/geol/globe.htm
This one adds to the picture of the previous animation:
http://www.palaeos.com/Mesozoic/Triassic/LateTrias.html#Geography
This one shows what the ridge looks like on land (Iceland) and suggest how difficult it is to find anything in the ocean below several thousand feet of water.
http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2010/08/mid-atlantic-ridge-in-iceland.html
Consider that most of the heat from surface (land) volcanism radiates into space. Most of the heat from submarine volcanism does not, at least not directly. There is no way for the IR to radiate directly from the source of the heat to space as there would be for a volcano in Iceland at night in winter.
Consider that there is likely much more than twice the volcanic activity under the oceans as there is on land as that is where most of the spreading centers are. When was the last time a satellite reported a “hot spot” in the middle of the open ocean someplace where there was no land? I suspect pretty much never.
All of that heat is absorbed into the water. I have no idea how much of an impact it might have on ocean temperatures but I have trouble believing it is insignificant when looked at on the scale of all submarine volcanism in the world at any given moment.
Such vents can exert a surprising thermal transfer into the surrounding water. See:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1212_051212_megaplume.html
They are not static, they can affect climate, and we have no maps for them, and minimal information on the subject. We have no real means of detection other than chance discovery of the surface temperature changes and local volcanic gas sampling.
To suggest that they are static is to ignore the nature of hydrothermal fields, and volcanism itself.
Mike says:
October 10, 2010 at 6:57 am
The heat flow from the ocean floor to the ocean water has not changed. This vent was there all along. The reason ocean temperatures have risen is because something else has changed.
THE ADJUSTMENTS ????
kuhnkat says:
October 10, 2010 at 10:26 am
>Mike,
> 1) ocean heat has been dropping
No. Sea surface temps are warming. Less is known about deep ocean temps but there is evidence of deep ocean warming too. See: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SGE66J00K.htm
>2) you are right that whatever heating has been added by these vents, underwater volcanoes,
>and lesser geothermal activity, it has been there all along and NOT represented in the Climate
>models. To put this forcing into the models means other forcings have to be REDUCED, like,
>let me see, maybe CO2!!!!
Heat is produced in the interior of the Earth radioactive decay and a smaller amount if left over from the formation of the Earth. The heat flows up and radiates into space. There is no evidence of it changing in the last 100 hundred years thus this heat flow is in equilibrium and not likely contributing to climate or ocean change.
>3) yes the heat flow from the ocean HAS CHANGED. We simply have not quantifed when and
>by how much as we were not measuring it! This MAY explain SOME of the variability of the
>ocean and atmospheric heat content that we do not understand.
>Here is an article that clearly shows the magnitude of the heating in the eastern pacific. There is
>absolutely no reason to believe this type of system is unique to this area:
>http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080109173830.htm
The article gives no quantitative estimate of the heat flow. To you as a lay person it just seems like it must a lot. But the oceans are quite large.
>This is the base board heater of the eastern pacific. If you read the research you find that they
>instrumented a large area of these vents and actually recorded earthquakes that closed many of
>them around 2007. This vent system opens and closes due to volcanism and other geologic
>activity changing the amount of heat being literally pumped into the Pacific.
But this net heat flow is not changing.
>Another proof that Climate Models simply do NOT include all the necessary items to function
>reasonably.
The proof of what climate models can or cannot do comes from comparing model results to reality. They predicted this warming though not in detail and regional effects are still not modeled well. See, for example, The Discovery of Global Warming – a history of the scientific discover of human caused climate change by Spencer Weart.
@Dave Springer
“There’s a problem however. Geothermal heat (heat of formation and radioactive decay) is about 80 milliwatts per square meter. The heat from these plumes and vents if they added up to 1 watt/m2 would mean the interior of the earth is cooling ten times faster than presumed. If that was the case it seems the earth would not have a molten core at this late date.”
You’re assuming that the earth’s core started out massively hot and has simply been cooling since then, with no added energy.
Gravity and tidal forces serve to wrench the core, causing friction, heating things up. In the aggregate, no doubt it’s cooler now than before, but it’s cooling down a lot slower than merely measuring the heat loss would suggest.
Haven’t really read this site, but it comes up in a google search about tidal heating. When you can have icy moons far away from the sun with volcanic activity, the heat is coming from non-solar means.
http://hotcoreearth.com/?p=47
“It is noteworthy to realize that Triton itself has the coldest surface temperature of any moon in the Solar System. This is very significant. Because it is so far away Triton receives very little sunlight and so is an icy dead world. Or is it? It has been discovered recently that Triton is actually volcanic! In other words below its surface there is excessive heat! A very strange discovery. Here is a relatively small moon in the distant reaches of the solar system emitting heat from its core just like our own Earth! The question is why?”
It is my understanding that much of the heat comes from radioactive decay.
Mike says:
October 10, 2010 at 12:22 pm
“Heat is produced in the interior of the Earth radioactive decay and a smaller amount if left over from the formation of the Earth. The heat flows up and radiates into space. There is no evidence of it changing in the last 100 hundred years thus this heat flow is in equilibrium and not likely contributing to climate or ocean change. ”
And what evidence exists that it has not changed in the last 100 years that leads you to conclude that the Earth interior energy budget is “in equilibrium” with respect to the subject of “climate change”?
“The vent with chimneys as high as one meter and fluids with temperatures up to 300 degrees Celsius was found at one thousand metres water depth in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
Still waiting for:
“The vent with chimneys as high as one meter and fluids with temperatures up to 400 degrees Celsius was found at thirty metres water depth in the north-west of the Lake Michigan.”
What I find to be of most interest is the fact that living organisms seem to be quite at home next to the newly-discovered smoker.
That means that this phenomenon is not “new”, it must have existed for some considerable time. How many more of these small smokers are out there? How long to they survive? How do life-forms migrate from one to another?
The very first thing that the discovery of the new smoker tells us is just how little we really know about our planet.
Fascinating!
A very strange discovery. Here is a relatively small moon in the distant reaches of the solar system emitting heat from its core just like our own Earth! The question is why?”
In order to know why one must abandon the model of “Flintstones´Universe”, where we were taught to figure out a dead universe filled with circling rounded stones only driven by gravity, winds, and lastly, by phantoms from the beyond the “twilight zone”, like “black holes”, “dark matter”, and all that stuff just invented for scaring kids, and keeping common hard working people in the belief they live in a cosmos only governed by chaos, where there is no order whatsoever.
A different version at:
http://www.holoscience.com/
“If these vents are located in many spots on the ocean floor, and have been spewing super hot liquid for billions of years – how come the oceans have not heated up to at least “hot”. Billions of years of this should have resulted in hot oceans ?
Unless that is of course – geothermal energy is the source of most of our climate energey and is just radiating out. That would mean solar and GH is negligable.
I dont under stand how you can have billions of years of super hot water coming out and the oceans not becoming hot ?”
Basically because our assumptions of earth history, that of geological uniformitarianism, might be wrong.
I have not read all the posts here but this volcanic vent is in oceanic crust, moving away from the mid-atlantic ridge, is underlain by recent ocean floor basalts, but is emitting methane etc.
As methane is generally thought to be biotic in origin, then pray tell me where the accumulation of biomass is to produce this methane from oceanic crust newly created?
Mid oceanic ridges are where mantle derived material appear at the earth’s surface, and well away from subduction zones. So where is the reported methane coming from?
Not from subducted sediments containing biomass.
The climatologist alarmist solution is plug ’em holes NOW before all the sea ice melts and we all die horribly! :p
Louis Hissink says:
“As methane is generally thought to be biotic in origin, then pray tell me where the accumulation of biomass is to produce this methane from oceanic crust newly created?”
Good question.
Titan’s methane sea.
Louis Hissink says:
“As methane is generally thought to be biotic in origin, then pray tell me where the accumulation of biomass is to produce this methane from oceanic crust newly created?”
I think it`s pretty well certain that methane and other hydrocarbons are made by natural process all over the universe. Nice article here :
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/sustainable_oil_production.html
My geology Professor at University and one of his PhD students discovered Carboniferous age (300 MY or so) fossilised black smokers in a lead/zinc mine in Ireland. There were fossilised organisms perserved within them. He has a theory that life evolved in these black smokers and he is now researching the origin of life in NASA. He’s a great bloke – a Bob Dylan fan too. (Bob on plate tectonics: “the carpet too is moving under you”.)
There are an unknown number of these black smokers associated with ocean ridges/spreading centres and they have been continually pumping out huge volumes of superheated water into the deep oceans for probably billions of years. I reckon they must have some effect on ocean temperatures/circulation patterns.
Nature published a paper a couple years ago that blamed a mass extinction 93 million years ago on undersea volcanic activity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/7510541.stm
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 10, 2010 at 4:31 pm
“There are an unknown number of these black smokers associated with ocean ridges/spreading centres and they have been continually pumping out huge volumes of superheated water into the deep oceans for probably billions of years.”
I suspect that they have not been continually pumping, but vary in total output.
There may be tens or hundreds of thousands of sources releasing heat to the ocean, perhaps in locations that affect ocean chemistry and/or circulation patterns. But we simply do not have the technology in place to measure what effect this might have on current climate. The real question for now is whether climatologists can disregard the known unknowns and claim the science is settled.
This last paragraph in the American Thinker article linked below seems relevant. A “georeactor” at the centre of Earth?
Thus, as researchers dig deeper into sources of climate change, we must seriously consider the concept of a molten Earth core fed by nuclear waste from a georeactor at its center emitting heat as well as the elements to form hydrocarbons creating petroleum. With great heat (including an abundance of CO2) escaping the crust by mechanisms such as hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor triggering major events such as El Nino ocean warming, we may be getting closer to climate change truth than the mythology of “man-made climate disruption.”
Sustainable Oil Production?
I’ve linked to this paper quite a number of times here with, given the tenor of many of the comments in this thread, not a great deal of influence.
http://www.ocean-sci.net/5/203/2009/os-5-203-2009.pdf
Geothermal heating, diapycnal mixing and the abyssal circulation
J. Emile-Geay1 and G. Madec2,*
It provides what, at least I find to be, compelling evidence that the widely accepted value for the contribution of geothermal heating to the oceanic heat budget (88mW/m2) is a large underestimation. Admittedly I have no expertise in this area and despite a not insignificant amount of time spent in familiarizing myself with the jargon and methodologies involved, I may be misinterpreting the significance of the work. My ego likes to think that the fact that my multiple linkages to it have not been met by anyone coming forth to tell me I’m completely FOS is a result of my great wisdom, but my more reasonable mind suspects it means my efforts here are mostly ignored.
At any rate what I find most informing about both this paper and the works it attempts to counter, is that the analysis in each case almost completely excludes the contribution from the hottest places on the sea floor from consideration. If, as this post suggests, those areas are also seriously underestimated or unknown, then even the elevated value that Emile-Geay and Madec arrive at may just be a new lower bound, something the author’s actually admit in the paper.
Even at the elevated number the geothermal heating value might not seem that significant, but it is worth remembering that the value for the marginal contribution of rising CO2 to AGW is only in the low single digits for W/m2 and it is at least arguable that that value is overstated.
Here are some selected quotes from the linked paper. I had to convert the PDF to be able to C&P and tried to edit out most of the typos and formating errors that resulted.
“Of course, the deep ocean is subjected to another heat source: the geothermal flux due to lithospheric cooling. Yet the latter is usually neglected in oceanographic studies, primarily because it amounts to less than 2% of surface heat fluxes (Huang, 1999) – a total power of 0.03 PW and a mean flux of 88 mW m−2 (Stein and Stein, 1992), while surface fluxes are on around 30 to 250 W m−2 , larger by three orders of magnitudes. Although it is clear that geothermal heat flux is weak compared to the surface ones, pointwise comparisons are misleading. First, geothermal heat flux is systematically positive whereas surface fluxes are of both signs, leading to important cancellations on a global scale. Second, the geothermal heat flow acts only on the densest water masses, which are only in contact with the atmosphere in very limited areas at high latitudes, where they are formed through heat and freshwater loss to the atmosphere and sea-ice. Those deep-water formation areas only represent a few thousandths of the global ocean surface, as opposed to a geothermal heat flux spanning the entire seafloor. It turns out that the ratio between the AABW outcropping area and the total seafloor area is about one to a thousand, therefore the surface integrals of the two fluxes scale comparably.”
…
“Ridges therefore display a maximum heat flux, while the minimum is 50 mW m−2 on the deepest (and oldest) abyssal plains. Since Eq. (1) becomes singular for young ages, Qgeo was bounded to 400 mW m−2 , as 95% of measurements fall below this value. This yields a global mean of 86.4 mW m−2 , compatible with observations (Pollack et al., 1993). One must however be cognizant of the uncertainties in this dataset: in addition to the uncertainties in the seafloor age estimates, coefficients in the formulae of Stein and Stein (1992) carry their own uncertainty by virtue of being indirectly obtained through least-square fits of theoretical predictions of global depth and heatflow to actual measurements, and they vary somewhat from basin to basin (the misfit being largest in the Indian Ocean, see Stein and Stein (1994)). A back-of-envelope calculation of error propagation shows these biases to dominate the total uncertainty in the dataset presented here.”
…
“The case is hereby made that geothermal heating is an important actor of abyssal dynamics. We recommend its inclusion in every model dealing with the long-term ocean circulation, for it substantially alters bottom water mass characteristics and generates a non-negligible circulation in the present-day climate. Further, recent results by Dutay et al. (2008) confirm its importance in correctly simulating tracer distributions in the deep ocean. The case corresponding to MIX Qvar appears to be the most relevant to most users, but it would be most interesting to prescribe it in conjunction with state-of-the-art parameterizations of diapycnal mixing.”
In any summary of the many theories of climatic change theory around 100 years ago, you would read about there being 3 broad classes of possible causes of climatic change: variations in the radiation arriving from the sun, variations in the transparancy of the atmosphere to various wavelengths of radiation, and variations in the heat given off from the earth. The latter class of causes seems to have been considered insignificant for many decades. Could such research as this be the dawn of its revival?
Using chemosynthesis there are microbes that live deep in these vents. they form the bottom of the food chain in the truly unbelievable biotic communities that live on these vents. We know next to nothing about the microbes because we can’t study them. It’s too hot, (chemically and thermally) and too deep. But there evidently are a lot of them. I assume they are the source of the methane.
Just a thought, wouldnt the earths core be affected by the suns magnetic flux? if so then as the magnetic influences affecting the molten core are likely to induce electric currents that would be shorted out and result in heating?? I am a lowly engineer so forgive if this is nieve!
This is one more case of scientists – who know everything about everything (just ask them) – getting blindsided by something in the real world that they, in all their wisdom, did not think of. I see these articles 1,2, maybe 5 times a year. Prior to these events, the scientists are all, “Well, WE know what is going on, Mr. Layman, so STFU and leave the thinking to those of us who have the credentials to think, and you go back to your delivery truck now. There is nothing to see here – except what we decide to tell you.”
Recently I even started a folder on my PC and one in my Bookmarks, both named, “Science does it again.”
Having said that:
Hip hip hooray!
I’ve been thinking this is an overlooked heat energy source for a very long time. I see that some others here have, too. I bow my hat to Bob(Sceptical Redcoat), who is asking these same questions.
Now if one wonders how it can affect climate, one would begin by looking for an existing mechanism which would act as a deliverer of the heat. The first phenomena that comes to mind is El Niño.
I first thought of undersea heat connecting with the climate in regards to the El Niño a long time ago. I was asking the question, “What causes the El Niño?”
I couldn’t find anything on its cause(s). That surprised me. It seems everyone looks at El Niño as a cause in itself, but an event which does not itself have a cause. Of course that isn’t the case. If anyone has an answer, they are are hiding it under a bushel basket. Describing El Niño is not explaining its cause. Yes, the currents change. Yes, the ocean temperatures change. But those characteristics ARE El Niño – they don’t address WHY the temps and currents change. Those are symptoms, not causes.
It occurred to me that if El Niños have an effect on weather, it is because something is introducing heat energy into the relatively balanced system and unbalancing it. And if that is happening, where is that heat energy coming from?
Well, the El Niño begins in the open ocean, along the Equator, as we all know. Is there anything along the Equator that might be introducing more heat energy?
The short answer is, perhaps yes. When I suspected hydrothermal vents, I went looking for them. Whether it is a coincidence or not, the first ones found off the Galápagos Islands are almost directly on the Equator – right in the area where the El Niño was first recognized as an oceanographic event that repeats in an irregular cycle. Something is cyclically putting heat at the surface in those areas – and then that something weakens or fails or changes or shifts, and the heat goes away. And later it all happens again.
No, I cannot know explain why it is cyclical. (I have guesses, but not answers.) But I have hopes of finding out why, or that someone else will.
To me the first question is “Are the vents generating enough heat to affect the surface?” This is the question being presented in this article. Perhaps the vents are not generating enough, not if one looks at it as heat dispersed evenly throughout the Pacific. Perhaps heat is sequestered for a while, in the deep ocean, and then some flow changes and the heat is by then built up enough to throw a monkey wrench into the system by overcoming or otherwise affecting some parameter.
So one corollary question is, “What happens to the heat after it leaves the vents?” Does it just disperse? I now know that it will not disperse evenly.
From Hydrothermal Vents Discovered Off Antarctica:
If the He3 is “staying there” in the dense layers, we have every reason to believe that so do the other elements/chemicals/dissolved minerals – but there is also a good chance some of the heat is also retained in those layers. If the deep ocean currents are anything like the others we know closer to the surface, we know they can be like rivers in the ocean, and can have different salinity, density and temperatures. All of these directly relate to heat transporting capacity and functionality. Just look at the Gulf Stream.
The next question would be: “How does this heat energy get close enough to the surface to change the ocean-atmosphere equation in a region?”
The heat is coming from somewhere. It is NOT just being shifted around on the surface, so the surface either has to be somehow absorbing more heat energy from the Sun (which does not appear to be the case), or the heat energy is coming from below. It is not being redistributed from a lateral direction on the surface. It is just a plume that shows up from what otherwise measures as much cooler surface water. But cold water can’t create a warm plume, no matter how one mixes it or pushes it around.
I like what Bob(Sceptical Redcoat) says, who wrote
Well, I may be getting a bit far afield of what he was asking, but I am asking a similar question.
And BTW, I’ve also asked quite a few questions here without getting very many responses. That is a little disappointing, actually. I agree with him.