It could be as much as an order of magnitude more, no one knows for sure how many submarine volcanoes there are. See after the jump for a few prior posts.
From United Press International, April 21:
When volcanoes deep beneath the ocean surface erupt, they release energy at rates high enough to power entirety of the United States, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Previously, most volcanologists assumed underwater volcanoes were much less violent than their peers on land, yielding relatively slow-moving lava flows.
But new data collected by remote-controlled submersibles in the North East Pacific suggest submarine volcanoes can generate powerful megaplumes, distributing volcanic ash across vast underwater distances.
The data showed these megaplumes are formed by large, fast-moving columns of heated water, and follow similar movement patterns to plumes produced by above-ground eruptions -- moving first upward and then spreading out horizontally.
Using the measurements captured by submersibles, scientists estimated the megaplumes generated by large underwater eruptions feature enough hot water to fill forty million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Researchers have detected megaplumes before, but their origins remained a mystery. The latest findings are the first to link the phenomenon with the release of magma from a large underwater volcano....
....MUCH MORE
If interested Nature made the paper linked above open access and it is about as fresh as this stuff gets, April 21, 2021.
*"Beneath the Ocean, a World of Mountains"
We have no idea how many submarine volcanoes there are.
There was a subsea survey a decade ago that extrapolated out to three million* of the damn things.
We're only now looking at the mud volcanoes in the Arctic.
Lots of stuff to figure out.....
****
....Here's a 2007 story from NewScientist:
The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.
The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes, 39,000 of which rise more than 1000 metres over the sea bed....
Human beings aren't near as smart as we think we are, a point I exemplify on a daily basis at Climateer Investing.
"Ships in Caribbean Told to Avoid Underwater Volcano ‘Kick ’em Jenny’ Over Risk of Eruption"
Avoiding anything named Kick 'em Jenny sounds like a good idea....
Giant underwater volcano found off Indonesia
Further proof that Homo Sapiens really don't know all that much about how the pieces fit together. After the headline story from EarthTimes I'll link to one of the most amazing finds of the last couple years.
From the ET:
Jakarta - Scientists have discovered a giant undersea volcano off Indonesia's Sumatra island, the state-run Antara news agency said Friday. The volcano spans 50 kilometres at its base with a height of 4,600 metres, said Yusuf Surachman, a director at the state-run Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology. Indonesian, American and French scientists found the volcano 330 kilometres off Bengkulu province on Sumatra while they were surveying the sea floor to study changes in its geological structure following major earthquakes in the region. "This volcano is huge and tall. There are no volcanoes of similar height on Indonesian land," he was quoted as saying by Antara. Surachman said the scientists did not know if the volcano was active....
Did you catch that? A volcano 15,000 feet tall and thirty miles across at its base. And, oh, it might be active.....
In 2016 National Geographic reported:
Six underwater volcanoes found hiding in plain sightThe edifice, named Actea, is one of six volcanoes recently discovered while scientists were mapping the underwater landscape of the Sicilian Channel, a heavily trafficked waterway off the southwest...
Oh.
And many more. Up north it's not just Iceland that has volcanoes. There are active volcanoes in the Bering Sea.
And off of Antarctica. Damn things are everywhere we look.
