Latest Seabed Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online By using electromagnetic technology to map a large area of seafloor near Central America and the northern East Pacific Rise, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography report that they have a better idea of the origin of the erupted magma that eventually becomes new seafloor. Scientists have known for several decades that the seafloor is formed throughout the major ocean basins at the linear chains of volcanoes known...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Scientists from the University of California, San Diego’s (UCSD) Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) have discovered a liquefied layer of molten rock in the planet’s mantle – a substance which could be acting as a lubricant of the sliding motions of the Earth’s tectonic plates. The magma layer was discovered at the Middle America trench offshore Nicaragua during a 2010 expedition aboard the US Navy-owned research...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In 2010, scientists working for the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and the University of Southampton made an astonishing discovery: the deepest and hottest known hydrothermal vents. These vents, which were found in an isolated trough in the Caribbean, have been named the Beebe Hydrothermal Vent Field (BHVF). With the discovery still fresh in their minds, a new team, led by the University of Southampton’s Dr. Jon Copley,...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton have discovered the location of an underwater volcanic vent in the Southern Ocean. In a study published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers describe how this vent, marked by a low-lying plume of shimmering water, differs from "classic" hydrothermal vents. The research group used the NOC’s high-resolution deep-towed camera platform SHRIMP to image the...
The terms “gas” and “sea” for many will invoke associations of reserves, business, and a lot of money. Whatever the association, most of the efforts in Israel’s energy field are being directed at gas buried deep under the Mediterranean seabed. Now a new geophysical study, the first of its kind in Israel, has uncovered a system of active gas springs in the Haifa Bay seabed, at relatively shallow depths, only a few dozen meters below the surface. The study, published in the journal...
Life deep in the seabed proceeds very slowly. But the slow-growing bacteria living many meters beneath the seafloor play an important role in the global storage of organic carbon and have a long-term effect on climate. A team of scientists from Aarhus University (Denmark) and the University of Rhode Island have developed a new method for measuring this slow life deep down in the seabed. According to URI Oceanography Professor Arthur Spivack, the relative abundance of amino acids that are...
A shipboard expedition off Norway, to determine how methane escapes from beneath the Arctic seabed, has discovered widespread pockets of the gas and numerous channels that allow it to reach the seafloor. Methane is a powerful "greenhouse" gas and the research, carried out over the past week aboard the Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross, will improve understanding of its origins in this area, its routes to the sea floor and how the amount of gas escaping might increase as the ocean warms....
Scientists have for the first time estimated the physical footprint of human activities on the deep seafloor of the North East Atlantic. The findings published in the journal PLoS ONE reveal that the area disturbed by bottom trawling commercial fishing fleets exceeds the combined physical footprint of other major human activities considered.The deep seafloor covers approximately 60% of Earth's surface, but only a tiny fraction of it has been studied to date. Yet as technology advances and...
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID WASHINGTON - Undersea explorer Robert Ballard leans back and smiles at the screens arrayed above his desk. One displays a view of a remote operating vessel, another scans along a seafloor never before viewed by humans. It's the Black Sea, not far from Ukraine, a region long closed to outsiders and now yielding a treasure trove of Byzantine vessels that met their ends 1,000 or more years ago. For Ballard the archaeologist, those vessels and their contents are a delight....
