Waddya mean "mind boggling"? One extrapolation estimated up to three million* submarine volcanoes. We have a few dozen posts on these things. As noted in 2016:
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.
From the journal Science, April 19:
New seamount maps could aid in studies of ecology, plate tectonics, and ocean mixing
The U.S. submarine fleet’s biggest adversary lately hasn’t been Red October. In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array.
With only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped with sonar, it is impossible to know how many seamounts exist. But radar satellites that measure ocean height can also find them, by looking for subtle signs of seawater mounding above a hidden seamount, tugged by its gravity. A 2011 census using the method found more than 24,000. High-resolution radar data have now added more than 19,000 new ones. The vast majority—more than 27,000—remain uncharted by sonar. “It’s just mind boggling,” says David Sandwell, a marine geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who helped lead the work.
Published this month in Earth and Space Science, the new seamount catalog is “a great step forward,” says Larry Mayer, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. Besides posing navigational hazards, the mountains harbor rare-earth minerals that make them commercial targets for deep-sea miners. Their size and distribution hold clues to plate tectonics and magmatism. They are crucial oases for marine life. And they are pot-stirrers that help control the large-scale ocean flows responsible for sequestering vast amounts of heat and carbon dioxide, says John Lowell, chief hydrographer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which runs the U.S. military’s satellite mapping efforts. “The better we understand the shape of the sea floor, the better we can prepare [for climate change].”
After the USS San Francisco accident, Sandwell and his colleagues secured funding from the Navy and NGA to hunt for seamounts with satellites. They identified thousands, including 700 particularly shallow ones that posed hazards to submarines. But the team knew its first catalog was far from complete. Now, armed with data from high-resolution radar satellites, including the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 and SARAL from the Indian and French space agencies, the team can detect seamounts just 1100 meters tall—close to the lower limit of what defines a seamount, Sandwell says....
....MUCH MORE
Ja, ja I got your 3600 foot outcrop and raise you this hitherto unknown specimen:
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 [link rotted, here's the Guardian]:
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.....
Or this from 2021:
"Submarine volcanoes release enough energy to power the United States"
Or the supervolcano that was discovered under the Aleutian Islands or......damn things are everywhere.
*....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.
