Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The Solomon Islands, where I lived for eight years, is just north of Australia and just south of the Equator. It is part of the “Ring Of Fire”, the area of strong earthquake and volcanic activity that encircles the Pacific. You can see below that the islands are on a plateau, with a clearly visible earthquake fault just south of (below) the island group. This fault is actually the line where the Indo-Pacific plate (lower left) dives under the Pacific plate (upper right), and has been diving there since forever. As a result it is the location of an unending string of earthquakes, tsunami, and vulcanism. You can also see another fault that starts just above the lower left corner and comes up to the right.
Figure 1. The Google Earth view of the Solomon Islands. The capital is Honiara, on Guadalcanal Island.
And along the main fault, in the location shown by the red circle, is an underwater volcano named Kavachi. There is excellent information about the volcano at the Smithsonian Global Volcano Program, including a photo gallery, an eruptive history, and the following geological description:
Kavachi, one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the SW Pacific, occupies an isolated position in the Solomon Islands far from major aircraft and shipping lanes. Sometimes referred to as Rejo te Kvachi (“Kavachi’s Oven”), it is located south of Vangunu Island only about 30 km N of the site of subduction of the Indo-Australian plate beneath the Pacific plate. The shallow submarine basaltic-to-andesitic volcano has produced ephemeral islands up to 1 km long many times since its first recorded eruption during 1939. Residents of the nearby islands of Vanguna and Nggatokae (Gatokae) reported “fire on the water” prior to 1939, a possible reference to earlier submarine eruptions. The roughly conical edifice rises from water depths of 1.1-1.2 km on the north and greater depths to the south. Frequent shallow submarine and occasional subaerial eruptions produce phreatomagmatic explosions that eject steam, ash, and incandescent bombs above the sea surface. On a number of occasions lava flows were observed on the surface of ephemeral islands.
So it has been sitting under there, smoking and muttering and bubbling and putting out ash and steam and gas for about a century and likely much more. And it has continued right up to near the present, viz:
Most Recent Weekly Report: 29 January-4 February 2014
According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, a satellite image acquired on 29 January showed a plume of discolored water E of Kavachi, likely from lava fragments and dissolved gases. A bright area above the submerged peak suggested churning water. There was no sign that the volcano had breached the sea surface.
Why is Kavachi of interest in the climate discussion? Well, the National Geographic was interested in what was going on inside the underwater volcanic crater, so they organized an expedition with the usual underwater camerafolk and scientists and the like. As they had expected, the water inside the crater turned out to be a) hot, and b) acidic. Not phony “acidification” like the alarmists are all up in arms about, which is really partial neutralization of the normally alkaline sea water. And as they might not have expected, the water in the crater was acidic enough that it was burning the skin of the divers, so they couldn’t actually enter the crater. The expedition leader said:
“Divers who have gotten close to the outer edge of the volcano have had to back away because of how hot it is or because they were getting mild skin burns from the acid water.”
This makes sense, because the volcano puts out large amounts of sulfur and CO2, and when lots of either sulfur or CO2 hits water you tend to get lots of sulfuric acid and carbonic acid. The NatGeo article says:
Despite the fact that Kavachi was not actively erupting, the video shows carbon dioxide and methane gas bubbles rising from the seafloor vents, and the water appearing in different colors due to reduced iron and sulfur.
So we have hot acidic water loaded with carbon dioxide, iron, methane, and sulfur … sounds like a recipe for a barren landscape, although perhaps a fascinating one. I can see why NatGeo was interested.
And even though the divers couldn’t go inside to get a look, they still wanted to find out just how few creatures were living in that extreme environment.
Well, this being 2015, the scientists pulled out their nifty robot camera and dropped it into the hot, acidic ash plume filled waters of the volcanic crater … and when the camera popped back to the surface after its allotted hour, to their immense surprise they found an entire ecosystem going full bore inside the crater, with fish, both silky and hammerhead sharks, and other usual undersea suspects.
As the expedition leader says, this brings up an interesting question:
“These large animals are living in what you have to assume is much hotter and much more acidic water, and they’re just hanging out,” Phillips says. “It makes you question what type of extreme environment these animals are adapted to. What sort of changes have they undergone? Are there only certain animals that can withstand it? It is so black and white when you see a human being not able to get anywhere near where these sharks are able to go.”
My conclusion? I gotta say, when I see life going on at a rate of knots in hot ocean water that is not just slightly less alkaline but instead is actually acidic, it merely reinforces my belief that the slight neutralization that will likely come with increasing CO2 will have little measurable effect on the ocean. Life is amazingly adaptive, and the amount of pH change predicted from CO2 is quite small. Given this discovery that fish and sharks can hunt and feed in hot, CO2 laden, acidic seawater, water humans can’t even enter, it’s just more evidence that the ocean life likely won’t have much trouble dealing with such a small change in its current level of alkalinity.
Regards to all,
w.
You Might Have Read This Before: If you disagree with anyone, could you please quote the exact words that you disagree with? That way we can all understand just exactly what you object to.
Oh, and hey, Gloria Swansong, I’m a Geologist. You want to know anything, just ask me, instead of swarming all of us with your authority-worshipping thread-bombing. I have it on good authority (the kind that you like) that Mr. Eschenbach is ten times the researcher of some tenured, hog-trough-funded person that you’d prefer to quote because YOU think he knows better.
Please, 2015 is half over, and you’re trying very hard to convince people who aren’t easily convinced, nor willing to snatch up the mantra you are droning on about. The kinds of folks you seek, bless them, are congregating in Paris, and soon.
The fact is, Mike, that the actual researchers, unlike a number crunching megalomaniac amateur like Willis, have observed the number of volcanoes in their study areas. Other real scientists have similarly counted the undersea volcanoes in their regions. When you combine these observations and extrapolate to all such volcanically active areas of the seafloor, the conclusion is that there are about a million such volcanoes.
That Willis doesn’t believe it, based upon his years cruising the surface of some saltwater, doesn’t count.
Gigantic undersea volcanoes discovered accidentally off Sydney, Australia:
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/13/huge-and-ancient-underwater-volcanoes-discovered-off-coast-of-sydney
Meanwhile, newly discovered ones are erupting off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, and the great, omniscient sage Willis imagines he knows how many undersea volcanoes there are, and it can’t possibly be a million.
Yeah, right!
Gloria,
You don’t need to be a “scientist” to make a simple calculation for a rough estimate of how many (underwater) volcanoes there are. One million is not based on any reasonable estimate it is orders of magnitude overblown.
Iceland lies on a volcanic hot spot and represents one of the most dense volcanic areas on earth (together with Hawaii and other hot spots), as many of these areas are where tectonic plates are drifting against each other or drifting away from each other (as is the case of the mid-Atlantic rift for Iceland).
Iceland has an area of 103,000 km2 and has 30 volcanic systems. That is 1 volcanic system per 3,300 km2.
The earth is 150 million km2 and should have 1 million volcanoes, that is one per 150 km2.
If even one of the most active hotspots on earth has an order of magnitude less volcanoes than the scientific (?) estimate, I am pretty sure that the estimate is far beyond reality…
About 73 years ago starting in August 1942 through November 1942 the southern Solomon chain was a hot spot of a different kind. (The campaign on Guadalcanal didn’t end until Feb. 1943 but the outcome was determined and the major actions were fought during that 4 month period of intense combat.)Proportionally it was the toughest and most sustained fight the US Navy ever fought involving surface actions. Seven major actions and five of those being surface actions fought primarily at night. Each side lost 24 warships ranging in size from Destroyers to Battleships. US KIA on Guadalcanal was 1,592. Japanese loses were over 20,000 on the island. But the toll at sea for the USN was over 5,000 while the Japanese lost about 4,000.
Much has been made of the tough fight the Marines and later the Army and their airmen had on and in the skies above Guadalcanal and the surrounding waters but in the end, for the US to begin the long fight towards the Japanese home islands the highest price was paid by the USN.
In all the Island invasions carried out by the US and allies during the war in the Pacific only during the first one at Guadalcanal and the last one at Okinawa would the USN suffer more KIA than the US/allied land forces involved.
Life is amazingly adaptive – even within a Hydrothermal Vent:
http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-videos/hydrothermal-vent-creatures
“My conclusion? I gotta say, when I see life going on at a rate of knots in hot ocean water that is not just slightly less alkaline but instead is actually acidic, it merely reinforces my belief that the slight neutralization that will likely come with increasing CO2 will have little measurable effect on the ocean.”
Once again the conclusion of the Climate “Science” alarmists is demonstrated to be epically wrong.
1) Sea life formed during a time when CO2 and Ocean Acidification were much higher than today. CO2 used to be 7000 PPM.
2) Coral reefs were formed when CO2 was much higher, and in fact coral needs CO2 to form, calcium carbonate is their backbone.
3) The atmosphere has been degassing for millions of years, that atmospheric CO2 has been what was used to form the reefs in the ocean, 7000 PPM to now 400 PPM.
Has anyone ever bothered to calculate out how much CO2 would be required to alter the pH of the oceans? The oceans are extremely vast, and pH is a logarithmic scale. While I haven’t taken the time to do the calculation, I’m pretty sure the oceans can absorb 100% of the atmospheric CO2 and there won’t be a measurable change in the Ocean’s pH, and that is assuming that the natural buffering and sequestration processed halt.
Someone in a chemistry dept please do that calculation, and put it is context of year of fossil fuels consumption.
Hey. Did we ever agree on how many volcanos can dance on the head of a pin, I mean, how many volcanos there are active on the ocean floor?
BTW, this post was about the adaptation of sea life to an acidic environment. Why all the argument about the number of volcanos.
IMO it’s relevant for a lot of reasons, besides the baselessness of Willis’ blanket assertion d*nial of science.
Man-made global warming advocates always attack skeptics who hypothesize that increased volcanic activity could be partly responsible for any actual rise in CO2 over the past 300 years or so. To make a reasonable estimate, you need to know how many volcanic vents there are on the planet and whether they are more or less active than in the recent past.
There is a variety of ways of making such estimates.
RACookPE1978 July 12, 2015 at 1:17 pm
I would be disappointed if there were not. As the poet said, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a meta phor?
Interesting questions.
First, the radiative heat loss from the surface is a function of the temperature … which in turn is a function of a host of things. I was just outside looking at the local “earth’s surface”. There was bare earth. There were areas with flagstones, There were areas with plants. There were areas with a layer of insulating mulch on top. There were areas in the shade and areas in the sun. There were damp areas that had been watered, and were evaporating. There were areas that were bone-dry.
And unfortunately, what you call “real-world relevant radiant heat loss” is a function of all of those things … and that was just a ten foot (3 m) square area of one garden.
So as far as I know there is no “actual fiormula for the relevent radiant heat loss” of the kind you envision. Every formula implicitly contains a host of simplifications.
Now, for a more general answer to your question, with those implicit simplifications, you might take a look at MODTRAN. Before you run the simulation, under “Save” down at the bottom set it to “Save text output for later retrieval”. Then hit “submit the calculation”.
When the results come up, down at the bottom it says “View the whole output file (select Save Text before doing run)”. Click the link, and it will show you enough results to keep a numbers junkie happy for weeks. Absorbances by various chemical species (e.g. H2O, CO2, CH4). Temperatures at various elevations. Freakin’ slant ray calculations, and enough arcane data to make your eyes cross.
The problem is, there is no simple formula of the type you envision. For each situation it has to be figured out, frequency by frequency, GHG by GHG, altitude layer by altitude layer, and then added all together.
Probably not the answer you were looking for, my friend, but there it is …
Regards,
w.
Coral reef found in a surprising place:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/first-known-coral-reef-discovered-in-iraq-140305.htm
Interesting, Gloria, thanks. The surprising part of the story is that the water goes as cold as 50°F (10°C), and the water is said to be polluted with oil and sediment … life is indeed amazing.
w.
Gloria Swansong July 11, 2015 at 8:44 pm
The OSU paper said that in some unidentified place there were 4,000 volcanoes in a million square km. It said nothing about how many there were per mile along the active volcanic zones. In fact, they said nothing about miles, so I’m not sure where you got that.
However, IF there’s an volcanic zone going straight across a million square km, that would give us 4,000 eruptions per 1000 km. This is not, however, four mile intervals. You’ve got the numbers upside-down. It’s not one every four miles … it’s one every quarter kilometer! That’s every 250 metres, every 800 feet.
Now, is it possible that there is some square of the ocean floor that’s 1,000 km (600 miles) on a side and has 4,000 volcanoes? Sure, that seems possible. That’s a lot of volcanoes, but the ocean is a big place, and some parts are tectonically bubbling.
But what they also said was that this means a million undersea volcanoes globally, which was the number I questioned. (Actually, it means 1.4 million undersea volcanoes, so I fear the scientists are fudging it a bit.) I don’t believe that number for a minute. Most of the ocean floor is NOT volcanically active. If a quarter of the ocean floor is active I’d be surprised … but that would mean that there would be even MORE volcanoes per square km, three times as many … not happening.
w.
One of the main claims about the danger of acidification of the oceans is the effect it has on shellfish, corals, etc.. These beasties definitely don’t like any move from alkaline toward neutral, because they have evolved to use alkalinity to manufacture shells.