SURPRISE UNDERSEA VOLCANO COULD OFFER ...

[Michael Grove]

 UNIQUE WINDOW INTO EARTH's INTERIOR

 

In 2015, a German research team sent a submersible to  

the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. West of Peru, the camera mounted robot explored a vast expanse of sea floor, four kilometers (more than 2 miles) deep, known for its extreme flatness. "It's very dark," recalls Antje Boetius, a biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. "Then you switch on the lights of the robot and see a new landscape that no one has ever seen before."

One feature in particular took Boetius by surprise: a small mountain rising 300 meters from the seabed, its steep slopes covered in lava shaped like pillows, and anomalous dark veins that are likely to be magma deposits. The team had discovered an undersea volcano, or seamount, on an abyssal plain—a geologically inactive region that shouldn't have any.

In a new study, the scientists suggest the seamount could represent a completely new type of seafloor volcanism, fueled by a hidden, shallow reservoir of magma. Evidence of isolated volcanism such as this could be a unique window into Earth's interior, says Adam Soule, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay, and director of the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute, who was not involved with the study.

[Michael Grove]

The discovery is the latest in a flurry of research about the Chicxulub impact, which was first hypothesized in the 1980s. Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami.