Monday, January 23, 2023

More Land For Norway

No, not by invading Finland, Norway already did that. And the Finns were tallying the upside of annexation: NATO membership, Royal family, oil revenues etc.

The number of submarine volcanoes around the world is still pretty much unknown. One study extrapolated a small census out to three million of the damn things if you count the inactive ones. Links after the jump.

From SciemceNorway, January 16:

New Norwegian land could emerge from the Atlantic Ocean

Many active volcanoes can be found on the seabed within Norway's maritime borders. Some are now only a few metres below sea level. 

“In the areas west of Jan Mayen, we’re close to having new islands form,” says HÃ¥vard Stubseid.

“We’ve now identified volcanoes only a few dozen metres below the ocean’s surface,” he says.

Stubseid has just returned from a research stint on the RV Kronprins Haakon. The researchers are studying a dramatic mountain landscape in the deep sea between Jan Mayen and Svalbard.

They have made several exciting discoveries.

Along Mohnsryggen and Knipovichryggen – Norway's part of the volcanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge north of Jan Mayen – the researchers on this and another German-Norwegian expedition last summer discovered new black smokers at a depth of around 3 000 metres. Black smokers are chimney-like structures commonly found near volcanically active places

Down to 3 000 metres below sea level
Stubseid is a deep-sea researcher at the Centre for Deep Sea Research in the Department of Earth Science at the University of Bergen. Volcanology is one of his fields of expertise.

The voyage he took part in on board the RV Kronprins Haakon was the first of three planned research expeditions to these areas through 2024.

“The vast majority of volcanoes in Norwegian areas lie at huge ocean depths, often down to 3 000 metres,” says Stubseid.

“But the areas around Jan Mayen are special.”

Beerenberg is a 2 277 metre high volcano on Jan Mayen. Scientists thought it was dead – right up until 1970. Then the 20 kilometre wide volcano suddenly had a major eruption.

Yearly ‘Norwegian’ volcanic eruptions
West of Jan Mayen and Beerenberg, the ocean is quite shallow. And they are volcanic....

....MUCH MORE

We put some of our prior links in 2021's "Submarine volcanoes release enough energy to power the United States":

Weird Hum Heard Around the World Was the Birth Of A Submarine Volcano
One of the stories on the Mayotte volcano referred to it as rare. They aren't rare at all.

"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 sight
The 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.