Slashdot Mirror
We All Nearly Missed the Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert:
She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a "peculiar large mass" floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand. The Kiwi passenger emailed photos of the strange ocean slick to scientists, who realised what it was -- a raft of floating rock spewed from an underwater volcano, produced in the largest eruption of its kind ever recorded.
"We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we've seen on land in the 20th Century," says volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who's co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption. The incident, produced by a submarine volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss. Back in 2012, the raft -- composed of pumice rock -- covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself... for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens -- or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland.
When an underwater robot first sent back detailed maps, one volcanologist remembers that "I thought the vehicle's sonar was acting up... We saw all these bumps on the seafloor... It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van."
"We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we've seen on land in the 20th Century," says volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who's co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption. The incident, produced by a submarine volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss. Back in 2012, the raft -- composed of pumice rock -- covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself... for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens -- or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland.
When an underwater robot first sent back detailed maps, one volcanologist remembers that "I thought the vehicle's sonar was acting up... We saw all these bumps on the seafloor... It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van."
400 square kilometers is 20x20 square kilometers. That's obviously not an exact number, and "some 400 square kilometer" makes it extra clear. So give a rough number for square miles too. 154 square miles gives an impression of precision that is not justified. Better yet, stop using that archaic unit of distance, but if you're going to keep using it, do it right.
The article couldn't be bothered to actually include any of the photos taken from the plane, but I think you can find one of them here.
Probably nothing because it was all dissolved in water. Oh and humans emit CO2 at a rate of about 100x of all volcanoes combined.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Quite correct. It's also notable that one of the reasons why AGW was initially considered discredited was that the oceans have an effectively infinite ability to absorb carbon dioxide, many times what humans could possibly liberate. Therefore, it was reasoned, 'carbonic acid' could not build up in the atmosphere. Unfortunately for everyone of Earth, the oceans overturn at a rate far too low to keep up with the amount of excess carbon we're emitting, and consequently we notice this whole 'ppm' thing going up, and as a nice bonus the oceans are acidifying too.
So as you say, the oceans can deal with the undersea volcanoes just fine. It's the gigatonnes of anthropogenic carbon being dumped directly into the atmosphere that we should probably think about dialing back a few notches.
(If anyone was looking for a citation for your figure of 100x, they would find it in
Gerlach, T. (2011). Volcanic versus anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 92(24), 201-202. )
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.