{"id":641037,"date":"2023-04-19T12:10:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T17:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/19\/its-just-mind-boggling-more-than-19000-undersea-volcanoes-discovered\/"},"modified":"2023-04-19T12:10:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T17:10:00","slug":"its-just-mind-boggling-more-than-19000-undersea-volcanoes-discovered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/19\/its-just-mind-boggling-more-than-19000-undersea-volcanoes-discovered\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s just mind boggling.\u201d More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The U.S. submarine fleet\u2019s biggest adversary lately hasn\u2019t been Red October. In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array.<\/p>\n

With only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped with sonar, it is impossible to know how many seamounts exist. But radar satellites that measure ocean height can also find them, by looking for subtle signs of seawater mounding above a hidden seamount, tugged by its gravity. A 2011 census using the method found more than 24,000. High-resolution radar data have now added more than 19,000 new ones. The vast majority\u2014more than 27,000\u2014remain uncharted by sonar. \u201cIt\u2019s just mind boggling,\u201d says David Sandwell, a marine geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who helped lead the work.<\/p>\n

Published this month in\u00a0Earth and Space Science<\/cite>, the new seamount catalog<\/a> is \u201ca great step forward,\u201d says Larry Mayer, director of the University of New Hampshire\u2019s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. Besides posing navigational hazards, the mountains harbor rare-earth minerals that make them commercial targets for deep-sea miners. Their size and distribution hold clues to plate tectonics and magmatism. They are crucial oases for marine life. And they are pot-stirrers that help control the large-scale ocean flows responsible for sequestering vast amounts of heat and carbon dioxide, says John Lowell, chief hydrographer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which runs the U.S. military\u2019s satellite mapping efforts. \u201cThe better we understand the shape of the sea floor, the better we can prepare [for climate change].\u201d<\/p>\n

After the USS San Francisco accident, Sandwell and his colleagues secured funding from the Navy and NGA to hunt for seamounts with satellites. They identified thousands, including 700 particularly shallow ones that posed hazards to submarines. But the team knew its first catalog was far from complete. Now, armed with data from high-resolution radar satellites, including the European Space Agency\u2019s CryoSat-2 and SARAL from the Indian and French space agencies, the team can detect seamounts just 1100 meters tall\u2014close to the lower limit of what defines a seamount, Sandwell says.<\/p>\n

Seamounts often occur in chains formed as tectonic plates ride over stationary plumes of hot rock rising from the mantle. As a result, the catalog will pay immediate dividends for studies of Earth\u2019s interior, says Carmen Gaina, a geophysicist at the Queensland University of Technology. It has already identified new seamounts in the northeast Atlantic Ocean that could help track the evolution of the mantle plume that feeds Iceland\u2019s volcanoes. The survey also spotted seamounts near a ridge in the Indian Ocean where fresh crust is made as tectonic plates spread apart. They suggest a surprising amount of volcanism in a region once thought to be magma starved, Gaina says.<\/p>\n

To biologists, seamounts\u2019 steep slopes resemble crowded, boisterous skyscrapers for corals and other marine life. \u201cThey\u2019re oases for biodiversity and biomass,\u201d says Amy Baco-Taylor, a deep-sea biologist at Florida State University. Whales use them as waypoints. But biologists debate the role seamounts play in marine biodiversity: Are they home to genetically distinct species, like remote islands? Or do they serve as stepping stones for life to hopscotch through the oceans? By pushing up the density of seamounts, the new maps could strengthen the argument for the latter, Baco-Taylor says.<\/p>\n

They will also boost efforts to protect biodiversity in international waters under a new marine protection treaty<\/a>. \u201cWe can\u2019t protect the things if we don\u2019t know they\u2019re there,\u201d says Chris Yesson, a marine biologist at the Zoological Society of London\u2019s Institute of Zoology. The maps will provide a practical payoff, Yesson adds: \u201cWe won\u2019t waste our time as much.\u201d Some of his colleagues, he says, once traveled to the Indian Ocean to study a seamount that turned out to be a phantom created by an error in presonar depth records.<\/p>\n

\n

A bumpy ocean bottom<\/h3>\n

Satellites have detected more than 43,000 seamounts. But only 16,000 have been charted in detail by sonar from ships and submarines.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\"Map

(GRAPHIC) D. AN-PHAM\/SCIENCE<\/cite>, (DATA) DAVID SANDWELL<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nowhere will the new maps be as important as in understanding the ocean\u2019s globe-girdling conveyor belt of currents. The currents ferry heat from the equator to the poles, where the water cools and gains density until it plunges downward, carrying heat and carbon dioxide into the abyss. But the flip side of this perpetual motion machine\u2014deep ocean waters defying gravity and rising upward\u2014has long been a mystery. The \u201cupwelling\u201d was once thought to happen evenly across the ocean, driven by turbulent waves at boundaries between deep ocean layers of different densities. Now, researchers believe it is concentrated at seamounts and ridges<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s a zoo of interesting things that happen when you have topography,\u201d says Brian Arbic, a physical oceanographer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.<\/p>\n

When ocean currents curl around seamounts, they create turbulent \u201cwake vortices\u201d that can provide the energy to push cold water up, says Jonathan Gula, a physical oceanographer at the University of Western Brittany. In unpublished research, Gula and co-authors have found that these wake vortices make seamounts the leading contributor to upward ocean mixing, and a central player in climate. Since the team relied on the old Scripps catalog, not the new one, the effect of the seamounts is probably even larger, Gula adds.<\/p>\n

The seamount catalog is sure to expand further with Seabed 2030, an international project to accelerate high-resolution sonar mapping that Mayer is helping lead. But space surveys will improve too. NASA\u2019s Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite, launched in December 2022, can measure the height of a water surface to within a couple of centimeters. Better remote sensing would be welcome, given the cost of sonar mapping voyages, Mayer says. \u201cI would love to see it threaten what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Nancie Grisby<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. submarine fleet\u2019s biggest adversary lately hasn\u2019t been Red October. In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":641038,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29038,121933,534],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-641037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-its","8":"category-boggling","9":"category-financial"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}