The Durham experts will lead an international team of 12 scientists aboard Britain’s Royal Research Ship James Cook which will set sail from Ponta Delgada, San Miguel, in the Azores on Friday, May 23.
During the five-week expedition they will use explorer robots to map individual volcanoes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge tectonic plate boundary – which effectively runs down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean - almost two miles (3km) below the surface of the sea.
They will then use another robot, called ISIS, to collect rock samples from the volcanoes which will be dated using various techniques to shed more light on the timescales behind the growth of the Earth’s crust and the related tectonic plates.
As tectonic plates – formations that make up the Earth’s shell - are pulled apart by forces in the Earth, rocks deep down in the mantle are pulled up to fill the gap left behind. As the rocks rise they start to melt and form thousands of volcanoes on the sea floor which eventually cluster into giant ridges.
The ridges along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge plate boundary are each about the size of the Malvern Hills and contain hundreds of individual volcanoes.
Principal investigator Professor Roger Searle, in the Department of Earth Sciences, at Durham University, said: “The problem is that we don’t know how fast these volcanoes form or if they all come from melting the same piece of mantle rock.
“The ridges may form quickly, perhaps in just 10,000 years (about the time since the end of the last Ice Age) with hundreds of thousands of years inactivity before the next one forms, or they may take half-a-million years to form, the most recent having begun before the rise of modern humans.
“Understanding the processes forming the crust is important, because the whole ocean floor, some 60 per cent of the Earth’s surface, has been recycled and re-formed many times over the Earth’s history.”
Professor Searle’s team will include scientists from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, the Open University, the University of Paris and several institutions in the USA.
They will date the volcanoes using radiometric dating (which measures the radioactive decay of atoms) and by measuring the changing strength of the Earth’s magnetic field through time as recorded by the natural magnetism of the rocks.
Source: Durham University
Related stories:
Undersea volcanic rocks offer vast repository for greenhouse gas, says study
A group of scientists has used deep ocean-floor drilling and experiments to show that volcanic rocks off the West Coast and elsewhere might be used to securely imprison huge amounts of globe-warming carbon dioxide captured from power plants or other sources. In particular, they say that natural chemical reactions under 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of ocean floor off California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia could lock in as much as 150 years of U.S. CO2 production. The findings are published today in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Icelandic volcanoes help researchers understand potential effects of eruptions
(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, researchers have taken a detailed look at what lies beneath all of Iceland's volcanoes – and found a world far more complex than they ever imagined.
Geologists Discover Magma and Carbon Dioxide Combine to Make 'Soda-Pop' Eruption
This discovery overturns a longtime belief by geologists, who thought that carbon dioxide was incapable of dissolving in magma, said Calvin Barnes, professor of geosciences and lead investigator.
Moon water discovered: Dampens Moon-formation theory
Using new techniques, scientists have discovered for the first time that tiny beads of volcanic glasses collected from two Apollo missions to the Moon contain water. The researchers found that, contrary to previous thought, water was not entirely vaporized in the violent events that formed the Moon. The new study suggests that the water came from the Moon's interior and was delivered to the surface via volcanic eruptions over 3 billion years ago. The finding calls into question some critical aspects of the "giant impact" theory of the Moon's formation and may have implications for the origin of possible water reservoirs at the Moon's poles. The research is published in the July 10, 2008, issue of
Nature.
Sweat, luck and eureka: Recipes for scientific discovery
Every week thousands of academic articles heralding discoveries in medicine and science are vetted and validated before being published in no-nonsense journals with names such as "Acta Crystallographica," "Methods in Enzymology," or "Macromolecules".
Mars air once had moisture
A new analysis of Martian soil data led by University of California, Berkeley, geoscientists suggests that there was once enough water in the planet's atmosphere for a light drizzle or dew to hit the ground, leaving tell-tale signs of its interaction with the planet's surface.
Ebb and flow of the sea drives world's big extinction events
If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits.
NASA data helps pinpoint impacted populations in disaster aftermath
When two catastrophic natural disasters struck within days of each other in May 2008, disaster relief, humanitarian aid, and health officials, as well as members of the news media tapped into a unique set of NASA data products describing the location of the exposed populations. In the hours and days following the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China's Sichuan Province, workers had the data they needed to assess the numbers of people possibly affected in these deadly events. What arose was a timely example of how NASA data comes to the aid of officials when such disasters occur.
