How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 61: Ocean Researchers Discover Massive Volcano
Ocean Geologists have discovered and mapped a volcano with unique properties. the properties will reveal a better understanding of how our world is formed.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session61
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, session 61. Why is it important that we map an ocean volcano one of the largest ever found in the ocean? You're about to find out on today's Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, he still puts his hand in the air because he doesn't care. Drew Lewis. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean panor. That's right, everything I do as an ocean panor has to do with protecting and conserving the ocean for a better life and a better ocean. So before we get into what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about volcanoes forming in the ocean, I just want to take the time out and say thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for listening to me, thank you for your comments, I've gotten a lot of people who joined the Speak Up For Blue community through this podcast and have taken the time to email me and thanking me for providing this information to you and for helping you understand what's happening with the ocean, giving you updates and helping you understand what you need to do to live for a better ocean. So I really want to thank you for thanking me, it's a true honor to do this, this is my passion as most of you know, and it's something that I like to do three to five days a week. So it's kind of fun. So this week we've got a very good week lined up for you, last week we had some news three days out of the five days that were some bad news articles. And I want to keep it light, I want to keep it positive this week. So we've got some some pretty cool discoveries with some animals. And today we've got really one of the discoveries are unlocking one of the mysteries of the world's most massive volcano. This came from the Huffington Post and it was an article that I thought was pretty cool. I'm not big into geology but I find it, I do find it fascinating. And a couple of years ago, scientists and researchers found the world's most massive volcano underwater, okay, underwater. So volcanoes actually happen underwater and above sea level. There are some active volcanoes around the world and when they spew, sometimes they cause a lot of damage, sometimes they don't because they're pretty remote. This one was in the Pacific, it's about a thousand miles away, a thousand miles east of Japan and about 6,500 feet below the ocean's surface. The volcanoes called Tamumasif, obviously massive I assume is massive because it's so big, it's the size of New Mexico. And they say it's nearly as big as the largest volcanoes on Mars, which is I think kind of a cool thing. It covers the entire area, it covers 120,000 square miles, that's 60 times the size of Hawaii's Manu Mona Lowa, or Loa, Mona Lowa, sorry, the largest active volcano on Earth. So quite the size and it's kind of cool because when they were talking to one of the researchers, they said, it has a, as they were mapping, as they were researching and they mapped, they digitally mapped the ocean by measuring its magnetic field and they mapped and they found that this, they found that there was a unique property about this volcano. And they said, the researcher William Sager said, he's a marine geophysicist at the University of Houston. He said, we're looking at something that's in between a mid-ocean ridge and a simple conical volcano, which is something that's kind of cool. And someone says, another researcher at GMR, Jorg Gellmacher, he's a marine geophysicist as well in Germany, he says this volcano is a beast. It's one of the biggest volcanoes around and it's not particularly tall, it's two and a half miles from base to summit, but he says if you, it was enormously wide and has a lot of gradual slopes and he went on, Sager went on to say, if you were standing on this thing, you would have a difficult time telling which way was downhill. So I guess it's so massive and so wide, it's amazing. They went on, the researchers went on a 36A expedition in early October to collect magnetic data and map nearly 400,000 square miles of ocean floor. That's a major, I've been part of mapping projects. That is a huge mapping area, or an area, a big study area to map that requires a lot of data. And I've done this and usually what happens is you take, you measure the bathymetry, the depth essentially of the ocean floor. And with this volcano, I'll have unique depths, it'll have that, it'll go from the base all the way to the summit and you can measure, when you, when you measure with these bathymetry, these bathymetry instruments, they're usually called multi-beam bathymetry and what it does is it takes points almost a centimeter resolution, it takes depths of centimeter resolution. So when you map these points, they're a centimeter apart in reality. So it's a, it can tell the extreme details, it can tell specific grooves, a centimeter apart, it's, it's really interesting. So you get very, very high resolution imagery and 400, and that, I mean, 36 day expedition would take that, it would take 36 days to map 400,000 square miles and get this amount of data. Imagine the computing power that these researchers have to map this so quickly after, you know, their, their expedition in October, it's just, it's just, it's just absolutely phenomenal. They say that mountain formed relatively quickly, if you talk about geological time. So it's 145 million years ago, that's when the lava began flowing onto the sea floor from the mid-ocean ridges. And the central part of the peak, however, is like a magnetic blob, suggesting a large eruption may have, may have been involved in its formation. Which I think is pretty kind of, it's pretty cool that they have this kind of thing. They say essentially this team of massive will help geologists better understand how the earth's interior work. And here's a quote from this, which I think is pretty cool. The secrets revealed will be ongoing, but worth the wait. And as we begin to understand, worth to worth the wait, as we begin to understand how such a massive volcano can form the way it did and what it means to us in respect to the formation of the planet we call home. That's a pretty cool, that's it from, that's from Sereda Nana James at the Smith Institute, Smith Ocean Institute, wrote in the expedition update, which I think is pretty, is pretty cool. It's it, I just love learning about this stuff because these are the unique properties of the ocean that we would never have found out 10, 20 years ago. These properties, you know, we can, we can, you know, discover them through magnetic, you know, magnetic instrumentation or measuring magnetic fields. I think it's important to know how the, how the ocean formed, how we get specific formations underneath, under, under the Earth's crust, how we get specific formations at the depths of the ocean, and how that affects the ocean in general because all these formations, and I'm not a geologist, and I'm just getting into it. I probably should have a geologist interview on the, on the, on the podcast, but it's one of those things where it's just, it's, it's kind of cool to just ask the questions of how this Earth was formed, what it does, and getting a volcano so young is kind of cool to study. And you, and it's, there's no, the only thing that's, that's, that's different is it's 6,500 feet down below sea surface. So it gets difficult to measure it and study it through viewing. Of course, the water must, I would imagine would be pretty hot if that was an active volcano. But it's pretty, you know, it's, it's pretty cool to see these kind of things, especially down below the ocean and to discover this. And I think it's cool if you've never done it before, but what I would suggest is go on Google Earth and there's a way you can get below the sea surface. So you go into the ocean, I usually like to go near Hawaii because there's so many different formations and such an island, such a set of islands that were, had a lot of peaks and grooves, and when you go along the coast, there's some big drop offs. And if you go underneath, I think you have to press the down key, when you get close to the surface, you go zoom in as close as you can, then press the down key in the space bar and they'll take you underneath the ocean. And then you can start moving around. And there's some discoveries, they call it Google Ocean. And there's some like monuments that you can look at and you can discover some interesting aspects of the ocean. And it's a 3D model of below the sea as, as high as resolution as you can find. It would be kind of cool if they ever put this volcano, this Tamu massive in there and you can actually discover that and you can kind of ride it and you can make videos of you swimming through it and stuff and just to see how big this thing actually is. And I wonder how that affects the ocean above it and all the different habitats that either were made by it or feet off of it. You never know, right? This is very, this is all speculative, but I think it's something that is just kind of cool and I want to share it with you. As you can see from me talking, I don't know a lot about geology, but I do think it's cool to find out how our Earth crust is formed, how it works because, you know, you hear a lot of earthquakes, you hear a lot of tsunamis, you hear a lot of the ocean shifting and stuff. I think it's interesting to learn more about how it's just made predict when it's going to shift. And if you can predict when it's going to shift and big earthquakes, you can maybe protect people from tsunamis or have an earlier warning system. So I think that's really important towards us. But just the fact that we can discover something about this Earth that we don't normally, you know, know about. You know, I think it's, I think it's kind of cool. So hats off to these researchers and having to post for publishing this. I think it's kind of a cool thing. If you think so too, just lay a comment on us at SpeakUpForBlue.com/session61 and we can chat about the discovery. Do you think it's cool? I'd like to hear more about it. It's one of those things that I think would be fascinating. So that's it really for today. It's a quick hit Monday. I just want to let you guys know about this. We're going to put the link to the Huffington Post article in the podcast or in the blog post and on the show notes and you can see what it's like. And if you, just to let you know, I know you guys are coming, a lot of you are coming back from Thanksgiving and that's fantastic. I love the fact that you guys got to spend time with, I hope you got to spend time with your family, got to relax. Hopefully you didn't do too much bin shopping and you still have some money left over. But I think it's kind of cool that you got to spend some time with your family. So happy Thanksgiving. I hope you had a great weekend and you got to spend time, lots of time with family and just relax and enjoy life the way it should be and got out into nature because I think that's kind of a fun thing. I hear for most of the US, it was a great weekend here in Canada and Burlington, Ontario, it was a fantastic weekend, a little chilly, but this is that time of year. So we expect it to be chilly, so that was kind of cool. But warmer than normal, believe it or not. But anyway, that's it for me today. I have nothing really else to say. I just want to say happy Monday and tune in tomorrow for another interesting article that we're going to talk about and we will chat with you on Tuesday. Have a great Monday. You've been listening to The Speaker for Blue Podcasts. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Happy conservation. [Music]