“Discovering Thousands of Underwater Volcanoes with Satellite Data”

Jakarta – A team of oceanographers led by geoscientist Julie Gevorgian of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, USA, used satellite data to reveal more than tens of thousands of underwater volcanoes.

Quoted from detikInet, Saturday (6/5/2023), researchers say there are thousands of underwater mountains that have not been found. These are ancient mountains formed by volcanic activity, they can rise thousands of meters in the dark, so they can pose a danger to submarines.

“Knowing there are so many underwater peaks to be found ‘brooding’ beneath the surface of the ocean is an amazing thing to think about,” said Gevorgian. Science Alert.

“Especially when you realize how big these seamounts are and how previously unknown they were,” he added.

Created by volcanic activity deep below sea level, seamounts can rise from around 3 to 10 kilometers high. They tend to be easy to detect by sonar, but only if a ship happens to pass by them.

Smaller seamounts less than 2 kilometers high are even harder to find, although they tend to form near mid-ocean ridges where magma is pushing through Earth’s thin, fractured crust.

In the past decade or so, scientists have turned to satellite data to detect small bumps on the ocean surface and map seamounts.

Sonar uses sound waves bouncing off the ocean floor to map features, then satellite altimetry does this indirectly, measuring slight changes in sea level that reflect the gravitational pull of submerged bumps in Earth’s crust. The bigger the mound, the stronger the gravitational pull pulls on the seawater above it.

Using this method, Gevorgian and colleagues identified 19,325 new undersea volcanoes, adding to the 24,643 seamounts two team members had previously mapped and cataloged in 2011, and corrected several errors in the process. The latest mapping brings a total of 43,454 seamounts, nearly double the number we know of.

Many of the newly discovered seamounts are on the smaller side, considered too small to be detected in satellite data. However, recent advances to broaden the coverage and improve the accuracy of satellite data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite and SARAL, the Indian and French space agency versions, are changing the picture.

Researchers who were not involved in the study said the findings could deepen our understanding of plate tectonics, volcanism, and the movement of ocean currents and marine life, in vast areas of the ocean that have long been uncharted.

This article has been published on detikInet with the title Found 20 Thousand Ancient Volcanoes on the Seabed

(she/orb)