As noted over the years: The damn things are everywhere.
From ScienceAlert, July 11:
Deep beneath the ocean waves, dangers lurk.
Not from cryptic monsters like the kraken, but from powerful forces reshaping the ocean floor itself.
Most of Earth's volcanic activity takes place underwater. Yet the scars those volcanoes leave behind have remained largely hidden.
Now, through an AI-assisted search of the seafloor, a team led by volcanologist Andrea Verolino of Paris-Saclay University in France has identified 73 previously unknown volcanic calderas hidden beneath Earth's oceans.
Calderas are vast crater-like depressions left when a volcano empties enough of its underground magma chamber for the ground above to collapse in on itself. Some are long extinct, but others mark volcanic systems that could erupt again.
"Our dataset," writes the team in an early-access paper published in Communications, Earth & Environment, "fills a major observational gap and provides a reproducible, upgradeable framework for submarine volcano characterization, underscoring the need to incorporate submarine calderas into future global volcanic assessments."
Most of Earth's volcanic activity takes place beneath the sea, where tectonic plates are constantly pulling apart, colliding, and sliding beneath one another. These restless boundaries allow magma to rise toward the surface, building volcanoes across the ocean floor....
....MUCH MORE, a deep dive, so to speak.
Here's January 2023's "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....
*****
...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 VolcanoOne 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 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.
A few months later, April 2023:
"“It’s just mind boggling.” More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered"
***
Ja, ja I got your 3600 foot outcrop and raise you this hitherto unknown specimen...
This story is two years old and there is no sign that collapse is going to happen tomorrow but is
something our obscure perils group would consider covering. Just another example of all these damn submarine volcanoes.From Deutsche Welle, May 5, 2019:
The biggest underwater volcano in Europe could erupt at any moment and cause a tsunami, according to new research. For residents of southern Italy, the Marsili is just one more disaster threat to live with.
And....let's just say there's an awful lot we don't know.
