Reader “Mark” in Tips and Notes writes:
Surprise Underwater Volcanic Eruption Discovered
Excellent 3D graphic representation of the lava. Note this particular volcano was previously report by Scarlet- yesterday.
Click photo to view more images. (British Antarctic Survey)
“An undersea volcano has erupted off the coast of Oregon, spewing forth a layer of lava more than 12 feet (4 meters) thick in some places, and opening up deep vents that belch forth a cloudy stew of hot water and microbes from deep inside the Earth.
Scientists uncovered evidence of the early April eruption on a routine expedition in late July to the Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano that stands 250 miles (400 kilometers) off the Oregon coast.”
“At first we were really confused, and thought we were in the wrong place,” said Bill Chadwick, a geologist with Oregon State University. “Finally we figured out we were in the right place but the whole seafloor had changed, and that’s why we couldn’t recognize anything. All of a sudden it hit us that, wow, there had been an eruption. So it was very exciting.”
http://news.yahoo.com/surprise-underwater-volcanic-eruption-discovered-210202200.html
And in mid July, Voice of America reported:
July 13, 2011
First Large Antarctic Undersea Volcanoes Discovered in Southern Atlantic
VOA News
A British research team has discovered a chain of 12 undersea volcanoes near the remote South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean. It is the first group of large undersea volcanoes ever found in the Antarctic region.
Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) say that seven of the massive volcanoes are still active. Some of the mountain peaks rise three kilometers above the ocean floor, nearly tall enough to break the water’s surface. The collapsed craters of others measure five kilometers across.
I wonder how many underwater volcanoes are down there and how much do they add to the overall water temperature.
Just maybe the co2 in the oceans is rising because more undersea volcanoes are going boom, just like the ones above water?
So, volcanoes, undersea, erupting, they’re large, spewing all sorts of under ground crap like CO2 (used to be called the Carbon Cycle in my day) & microbes??? There are dozens of them, they’ve only just been discovered? They’re hot giving off large amounts of undersea heat? And here I am thinking Earth sciences are settled science with NOTHING left to discover, ever! I don’t suppose they just happen to lie around the West Antarctic Penninsula or could possibly affect the ocean temperatures locally at all, causing the water to be enriched by life that those whales & all the other sea based life forms seem to like so much? ;-)) Anyway it is an interesting post.
Did the volcano get the requisite carbon emission charge levied for that CO2 release? /sarc
Don’t really get the title to this article, where does it say that underwater volcanoes are more common than we thought? They’d been monitoring the volcano for over a decade and predicted when it was going to erupt:
“Chadwick and colleagues have been keeping tabs on the peak since it last erupted in 1998. Thanks to a monitoring system they developed to measure the mountain’s minute movements, the team predicted the volcano was due for another eruption sometime between 2011 and 2014.
“So for me, it’s a very exciting thing that this worked!” Chadwick said.”
Ian Plimer will be pleased
And with billions of tonnes of lava being extruded onto the sea floor plus the heat both direct and indirect this is bound to have and effect on sea levels, not to mention sedimentation from the big rivers.
Interesting but not unsurprising considering that we know more about the far side of the moon than the ocean’s floor. It is thought that the ridge system, constructive plate boundaries, contains 1million active volcanoes.
The South sandwich Islands are part of a subduction boundary that has formed the island arc which will be volcanically active. So these undersea volcanoes should not have been a surprise to a Geologist.
It is my understanding that, by studying the read-out from a seismigraph, you can determine the cause of an earthquke. This might be a dip-slip faualt, strike-slip fault, subsidence, or volcanic eruption. I think therefore that it is unlikely that a volcanic eruption would go unnoticed, wherever it was on the globe.
How much do undersea volcanos contribute to Ocean acidification? If it is a significant amount, how do these animals that thrive near vents and have a calcium carbonate shell survive?
http://www.suite101.com/content/new-study-proves-volcanoes-cause-global-warming-a220106
I do think that volcanic activity may have a certain influence on global warming
in fact the warming effect of volcanoes seems to look very similar to that of man made global warming.
For example, look carefully at my results from Hawaii
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Are they sure this is a volcano? Maybe it’s a Soviet era sub with a caterpillar drive commanded by a Lithuanian captain with a Scottish accent?
These sorts of stories leave me amazed at nature, first; and then at the arrogance of climate modelers who assume that they know all the major natural processes. Leave alone their impact. Just tweak the right parameters and viola the model fits the data, even though it is incomplete. “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
SteveE, since they’ve discovered the Oregon eruption recently, then clearly it’s more common than we thought, by at least 1.
metryq says:
August 11, 2011 at 3:18 am
“Are they sure this is a volcano? Maybe it’s a Soviet era sub with a caterpillar drive commanded by a Lithuanian captain with a Scottish accent?”
Hope not. Jack Ryan is fat, stupid, and ugly now.
“Image of bubbles of liquid carbon dioxide”
Liquid CO2? am i missing something????
steveta_uk says:
August 11, 2011 at 3:34 am
SteveE, since they’ve discovered the Oregon eruption recently, then clearly it’s more common than we thought, by at least 1.
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No, they were surprised to see that it had erupted, not that it was there. Like they said in the article, they’d been monitoring it since it last erupted in 1998 and predicted a eruption sometime between 2011 and 2014.
Gareth Phillips says:
August 11, 2011 at 2:39 am
How much do undersea volcanos contribute to Ocean acidification? If it is a significant amount, how do these animals that thrive near vents and have a calcium carbonate shell survive?
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They don’t, they been erupting for millions of years and so are nicely in equalibrium. An event like the Deccan or Siberian traps eruptions might have an effect, but that’s certainly not happening at the moment.
jason says:
August 11, 2011 at 1:03 am
Just maybe the co2 in the oceans is rising because more undersea volcanoes are going boom, just like the ones above water?
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I suspect that volcanoes are highly variable in the amount of CO2 they produce. The undersea ones are likely not gassy depending on the magma source.
At least I know what Al Gore’s response would be to the news about this volcano
Perhaps there are unusually few undersea volcanoes erupting at present. Could that be why I am so damned cold?
“bubbles of liquid carbon dioxide floating out of the seafloor”
There is a sentence you will never see in the New York Times or the Washington post.
With large subsurface eruptions one would think that scientists would be measuring the dispersion of heat, CO2, etc as it was dispersed from the volcano. There should be no need for conjecture. For a given type of eruption with a known size, it should be relatively easy to `model’ the effects. At worse, the model results would be as accurate as the climate models. I guess that carbonate shelled critters near black smokers, etc have adapted biological mechanisms to cope with increased (?) acidity.
Thanks for the laugh, metryq.