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.
Obviously, it’s WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT! Immediate action is needed!
…as an aside, I most certainly miss J. Tuzo Wilson. I wonder what he’d have to say about some of this…I had the privelege of hearing him lecture at the University of Toronto many times before his passing in 1993. A quiet, gracious, and undeniably brilliant man.
“the_Butcher says: August 11, 2011 at 12:46 am
I wonder how many underwater volcanoes are down there and how much do they add to the overall water temperature.”
See if you can find it on this site. I got a link a while back to some research showing 5000+ active volcanoes on the ocean floor. It was a great read and I’ll be darned if I can find the link now 🙁
@Steve E.
“equalibrium”? Really?
John F. Hultquist says:
Yes you are. I missed it with respect to salt water so am returning the favor. Here is the link you need:
http://www.standnes.no/chemix/english/phase-diagram-co2.htm
Looks like those bubbles would be under quite a bit of pressure (55ATM at 20C, if I’m reading right)
But can you help me understand this? “…the temperature and pressure at which the liquid and gaseous phases of a pure stable substance become identical.”
@TRM
I believe that figure is a figment of the collective imagination of a bunch of eccentric vulcan(ist)s. The current state of under water volcanoes seem to be in the range of 150(0) to 15,000 to somewhere around 35,000 to a bazillion … or there about.
Apparently it is all about the extrapolations being done. Is it the Hoockey-schtick-Mann technique or the Hansen’s super online Schmidt add-on trick?
Although I’m betting my money on the high number department because that will screw the cheeky tax paid communist hippie climatologists up the rump, apparently because they can’t believe in thousands upon thousands volcanoes 20,000 leagues under the sea if only for pure propaganda reasons. :p
@Mike Bromley the Kurd
“I most certainly miss J. Tuzo Wilson.”
I have his paper on transform faults in my ancient copy of Cox (1973) Plate tectonics and geomagnetic reversals. My geophysics lecturer Fred Vine is in there too.
clipe says:
Tips & Notes.
July 11, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Underwater Antarctic volcanoes discovered in the Southern Ocean
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-07/bas-uav071111.php
@TRM August 11, 2011 at 12:56 pm:
Some time back I tried to find out about where and how many there were, including vents.
I hope I am not beating a dead horse, but I was looking because I suspected there was some tie-in between the vents and ENSO. I’ve looked high and low to see what the evidence is for the source of the El Niño heat along the Pacific at the equator. Coincidentally or not, SOME of the known vents are positioned well to do just that – add heat right in the eastern Pacific. Right now it just looks like coincidence, but if more are found then more heat would be added to whatever is normally going on there. It MIGHT be significant, though the current evidence doesn’t seem to indicate that.
So, this headline really perked my ears up. But the additional heat at the moment doesn’t seem all THAT much (for now).
The ENSO-vent connection may just be me looking for connections where there aren’t any. But the heat source for El Niño isn not known at present. I’ve only read one article which even addressed it at all. That one states that they believe the heat is somehow stored below and then it comes to the surface cyclically. While plausible, that appears to only be a best guess. It did not describe what mechanism caused the storage regime (La Niña) in the cycle and what caused the release regime (El Niño).
Similarly, if the vents and vulcanism are happening, there has to be a mechanism that explains the oscillations of heat storage and release.
A few things mentioned here argue against the idea. One is that the volcanism described here is not near the Pacific Equator, but in Oregon and Antarctica. Now, most of the Pacific equatorial area is within the central region of the Pacific Plate, so is not known as highly volcanic. However the western end is certainly in the Ring of Fire, while the vents are in the east, near SA and almost directly on the Equator. So, both ends are at least slightly affected by volcanism, even if it is not in itself cyclical. If currents shift, or undersea volcanism is found to be cyclic, perhaps this heat energy is dissipated sometimes and not at other times. That would have the effect of focusing the heat or not.
There is a LOT to learn yet about the ocean floor. We WILL have surprises. But what do they mean, when taken all together?
I would say that those talking about CO2 from the volcanism might be missing what I think is the more likely probability that the direct additional heat energy doesn’t need CO2 as an intermediary. Heat is heat and doesn’t need CO2 to take the long way around – traveling all the way up to the stratosphere to indirectly add heat down below.
Hector Pascal says:
August 11, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I have his paper on transform faults in my ancient copy of Cox (1973) Plate tectonics and geomagnetic reversals. My geophysics lecturer Fred Vine is in there too.
We’re both fortunate! I wonder if Bob Ballard will ever weigh in on an estimate of black smokers worldwide?
Pamela Gray says:
August 11, 2011 at 6:44 am
Most of the moutain-like volcanoes have been discovered. How often they erupt is another thing all together.
======================================================
EXACTLY!!!! Pamela, Just look at how well the C02 graph fit’s with the INCREASED volcanic activity here.
http://www.handpen.com/Bio/sun_freaks.html#100
http://www.handpen.com/Bio/volcanis.gif
Fixed link I hope
A 100 Year World Wide Increase In Volcanic Activity
http://www.handpen.com/Bio/sun_freaks.html#100
Microbes, huh. I’m reading Tommy Gold’s “The Hot Deep Biosphere”. Looks like he was right again.
Friends:
Several here have commented on the amounts of heat and CO2 emitted by underwater volcanoes. But in the context of the AGW hypothesis, the emission of sulphur from undersea volcanoes is much more important.
Let me give you one (of several) possible scenarios where there is no change to the sinks and sources of CO2 but the observed recent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration results.
There is an equilibrium of CO2 concentration in the air and in the ocean surface layer. And the oceans exchange (in both directions) tens of times more CO2 than the anthropogenic emission of CO2 in each year.
The system is buffered (mostly by dissolved calcium compounds) so cannot change much in the absence of a temperature change or a change to the pH of the ocean surface layer.
Assume nothing changed except the pH of the ocean surface layer
(i.e. no changes to sources or sinks and no additional or anthropogenic CO2 in the system).
Then what pH change would induce the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration which we have observed?
A reduction of only 0.1 in pH would be more than sufficient and is much, much too small to be detectable.
Could such a change have happened despite the buffering and, if so, how?
Yes, it could. Water travels in the depths with the thermohaline circulation for centuries before it returns to the ocean surface layer. Water that travels past under-sea volcanism will dissolve sulphur ions which reduce its pH. This low pH water will reach the ocean surface centuries later and thus will reduce the pH of the surface layer with resulting increase to atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This is but one of several possible scenarios whereby there is no change to sources and sinks and the increase to atmospheric CO2 being entirely natural and with the anthropogenic emission being irrelevant.
Nobody can know if this volcanism conjecture is the correct explanation for the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration but it is at least as likely as the conjecture that the anthropogenic emission is the cause.
But this volcanism conjecture explains more than the conjecture of an anthropogenic cause for the CO2 rise.
Anthropogenic cause conjecture:
The rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is induced by a variation in the quantified anthropogenic CO2 emission which causes a postulated and unknown effect on the carbon cycle.
Volcanic cause conjecture:
The rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is induced by a variation in the unquantified undersea volcanic sulphur emission which causes a known effect on the carbon cycle.
Neither conjecture is likely to be the explanation of the major cause of the observed rise in atmospheric CO2, but both conjectures are probably right in that the effects they describe affected the rise.
Richard
Quite apart from the heat from submarine volcanism, might not a more important consequence of decades or centuries-long emissions of carbon dioxide from the many smokers, volcanoes and other vents on the sea floor explain, at least partially, the 2ppmv annual rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide?. ie. is the anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide vastly overstated? Stable at abyssal pressures and temperatures, all it needs to release this gas is upwelling which will reduce pressures and increase temperatures sufficiently, in many places, to oversaturate sea water in CO2, leading to its release. Upwelling is a feature of many of the periodic oscillations of ocean temperatures.
TonyG says: August 11, 2011 at 2:01 pm
But can you help me understand this? “…the temperature and pressure at which the liquid and gaseous phases of a pure stable substance become identical.”
**************************************
Tony,
Gas is compressible. As you compress it, the gas will become more and more dense. Eventually it will have the same properties as the liquid. That point of pressure and temperature is called the critical point.
The CO2 phase diagram is also interesting in that at atmospheric pressure, CO2 does not exist as a liquid. It can only be a gas and a solid. So, you can buy a pound of solid CO2 down at the Mega-Mart, but you can only buy liquid CO2 in a steel cylinder under pressure, e.g a CO2 fire extinguisher.
At atmospheric pressure, the “dry ice” doesn’t melt: it “sublimates”, i.e. converts directly from a solid to a gas. And if you have ever discharged a CO2 fire extinguisher you would have seen CO2 “snow” which just disappears. Cool. In an emergency, miscreants have been known to discharge a CO2 fire extinguisher into a bucket of cans of beer to cool them. But only in an emergency.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
(Who would have only used an EXPIRED fire extinguisher for cooling beer.)
“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.”
“Massive” volcanoes only come from massive eruptions that release massive amounts of previously sequestered into the ecosphere, as compared to what happens to the carbons in trees burned in a forest fire. None of this new “massive” is factored into models and if “massive” is massive enough, it will just invalidate them. But if no one discovers the “massive” evidence, will it ever matter to the IPCC? I think nothing will deter them from their quest to destroy our liberty and prosperity.
LazyTeenager says:August 11, 2011 at 4:40 am
[…]
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.
If you had left out “The undersea ones are likely not gassy” you could have had a coherent statement
that might be something they need to take in account in determining the human contribution to the atmospheric CO2 content.
The pastafarian colors not withstanding, but it’s an interestingly detailed image that show two of the peaks having collapsed. What would the effects have been above ground had it not been for all that water pressure holding the forces all back?
A more accurate title might have been “Undersea Volcano erupts as predicted”.