Bringing Underwater Volcanoes, Hot Springs, and the Life That They Host Directly Into Your Living Rooms Live 24/7

Abstract:

Every night millions of people across the globe gaze in awe up into the night sky and observe the planets and stars, often wondering what is out there. In contrast, although the oceans cover 70% of Earth, few humans are able to penetrate the oceans surface and directly observe the “stars” located miles below. Yet, here, miles beneath the oceans’ surface a 65,000 km-long volcanic mountain chain, the longest on Earth, wraps around the globe hosting hundreds, perhaps thousands of underwater hot springs supporting some of the most novel life known. Indeed, within these extreme environments, organisms bathed in >100°C fluids thrive in the absence of oxygen, utilizing carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and metals as their energy sources. Within the past few years, with the installation of a cutting edge underwater cabled observatory, anyone connected to the Internet can directly observe these dynamic environments from their living room, witnessing in real-time parts of our planet rarely seen by human eyes that have been in perpetual darkness for millions of years. The observatory, called the Cabled Array, includes 900 km of underwater high power and bandwidth fiber optic cables that extend >300 miles offshore to the most active underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon. The volcano, Axial Seamount, erupted in 1998, 2011, and 2015. Axial Seamount now hosts cabled seismometers, chemical and biological sensors, and HD cameras that stream data back to shore at the speed of light continuously. The Cabled Array captured the 2015 eruption live. On April 24, real-time flow of data to shore indicated that there were >8,000 earthquakes over 24 hours and that the seafloor fell >2.4 m over this same time interval. This was followed by thousands of “acoustic events” that are thought to represent the eruption of a 127 m-thick lava flow.

 Making use of stunning underwater video, this talk will take you to this underwater volcanic observatory, funded by the US National Science Foundation, and introduce you to the power of the Cabled Array. Video will include a glass-covered, 3-month old eruption with large collapse zones from which billions of microbes streamed from the still cooling lava and 2 m-tall metal sulfide chimneys emitting boiling fluids. These stone monoliths are covered in such dense biological communities that the rocks are completely obscured.