Deep Sea Vents: Hot, Wet, Weird

Jan. 9, 2008 -- Thirty years ago, scientists exploring the depths of the ocean came across jets of hot water, spewing from the sea floor, which hauled up flecks of gold and other minerals from Earth's interior and nurtured weird, resilient microbial life forms.

In a paper issued on Wednesday, marine seismologists looking at a site in the East Pacific say they have gained insights into how this unique plumbing system of hydrothermal vents works.

The jets are found thousands of feet below the surface on the mid-ocean ridges -- geologically active "mountain ranges" -- formed from mighty tectonic plates that push into each other and form spines along the ocean floor.

Until now, the main hypothesis about hydrothermal vents has been that gigantic pressure forces seawater through large faults along the flanks of the ridge.

The water, the theory goes, is then heated by coming into proximity with volcanic rock before re-emerging at the middle of the ridges, where the vents are usually clustered.

But in the first detailed investigation into vent circulation, a team led by Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University's Earth Observatory in New York has come up with a different picture.

They placed seismometers over a 1.54-square-mile area of the East Pacific Rise, about 500 miles southwest of Acapulco, that has been under study for the past 15 years.

The sensors monitored tiny earthquakes that happen 8,125 feet below the surface. Around 7,000 of these brief, shallow quakes were recorded in 2003 and 2004 alone.

The tremors also built up an image of how the water circulates, because the quakes were intriguingly clustered around where the cold water entered the rock.

The map drawn by Tolstoy's team shows a down-flow pipe that descends about 2,275 feet into the ridge, then fans out for about 650 feet.

The water then plunges down another 1,950 feet until it arrives just above a bulge of magma. There, the water is heated and disgorged along the ridge through a dozen vents about 1.2 miles north of the entrance pipe.

Tolstoy's team contends that what appear to be tiny quakes are caused by the physical stress of cold water passing through hot rocks.

And, contrary to the prevailing hypothesis, they believe the water travels not through large faults but through systems of tiny cracks, and at a much higher rate of turnover than previously thought.

The paper, published by the British journal Nature, adds critical knowledge about seafloor currents and the nutrient flows that feed them. It also furthers understanding about the mechanics of heat transfer from Earth's crust to the seafloor.

Hydrothermal vents are sometimes called "black smokers" for the bilious clouds of material that emits from their chimneys.