NS: First footage from world's deepest volcanic vents

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NS: First footage from world's deepest volcanic vents

Post by bystander » Mon Apr 12, 2010 5:03 pm

First footage from world's deepest volcanic vents
New Scientist - 2010 Apr 12
At this depth, the water is hot enough to melt lead, and the pressure it exerts means that every square centimetre has to withstand the weight of five hefty men.

"It was like wandering across the surface of another world," says Bramley Murton, a geologist at the National Oceanographic Centre (NOC) in Southampton, UK, who piloted the Hy-Bis underwater vehicle around these deep volcanic vents and filmed them for the first time.

"The rainbow hues of the mineral spires and the fluorescent blues of the microbial mats covering them were like nothing I had ever seen before," Murton says.

These are the first images to be beamed back from the depths of the Cayman trough, the world's deepest undersea volcanic rift, which runs across the floor of the Caribbean.
Image

Three Miles Down in the Carribean, the Deepest Volcanic Vents Ever Seen
Discover Blogs: 80beats - 2010 Apr 12
The bottom of the sea is a strange and marvelous frontier, as we were reminded last week by the discovery of the first known animals to live without oxygen. Today a team of British researchers say their undersea robotic explorers have found something new down in the depths of the Caribbean Sea: the deepest hydrothermal vents ever seen.
Scientific expedition discovers world's deepest known undersea volcanic vents
RRS James Cook: Voyage 44 - 2010 Apr 11
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd5updPG ... r_embedded[/youtube]

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