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Highly active undersea volcanoes
And we wonder why our oceans are warming
11 May 09 - Scientists
and university students from New Zealand, Britain and the United States
recently investigated three active submarine volcanoes – the Brothers,
the Rumble II West and the shallow Rumble III - in the Kermadec Arc,
northeast of New Zealand.
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Location
of a number of submarine volcanoes in the Kermadec Arc.
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These volcanoes form part of a chain of about 90 volcanoes that rise
from the ocean floor between New Zealand and Tonga. The volcanoes are
mostly conical volcanoes – some as big as
Mt
Ruapehu, the largest active volcano in New Zealand. Some of the
underwater volcanoes have large calderas* indicating they were formed by
powerful eruptions.
The group found that one of the
volcanoes, Rumble III, had erupted violently sometime during the last
two years. The summit cone had collapsed, reducing the height of the
volcano some 100m (330 feet) and filling the adjacent crater.
Rumble III's eruption and the
catastrophic collapse of its summit is consistent with the fact that a
number of the 90 submarine volcanoes along the Kermadec Arc are highly
active, said Co-chief Scientist on the voyage Dr Cornel de Ronde.
Mt
Ruapehu is
2,797 meters (9,177 ft) tall. If these submarine volcanoes
are this
large, and they are "highly active," then we must be talking about
a tremendous
amount of lava.
Lava pours
out of the ground at around 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit (10 times
the boiling
point. Active underwater volcanoes of this magnitude must be -
have to be -
pumping vast amounts of heat into the seas.
But I guess it's more convenient to blame humans.
See entire article, entitled "Exploring undersea volcanoes"
http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/news_events/news_archive/
2009_news_archive/exploring_undersea_volcanoes
Read more about the trip and see photos taken above and below the
surface.
http://data.gns.cri.nz/hazardwatch/gsblogs/heidi.html
See great
video of eruption of the "Brimstone Pit"
from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
"At any moment you felt it could go Mount St. Helens," says the
narrator.
"You could see the glow of the lava inside the pit."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V36LnXI37Vw
*
Some calderas are several kilometers (miles) deep
and more than 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) wide.
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