Sub-Oceanic Volcano Found

Massive Extinct Volcano Discovered Beneath Pacific Ocean

newly discovered Pacific Ocean seamount.
  The newly discovered seamount rises up some 3,600 feet (1,100 meters) from the seafloor near the Johnston Atoll, at a depth of about 16,730 feet (5,100 m) under the Pacific Ocean.
Credit: Image courtesy of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center.

Lurking some 3.2 miles (5.1 kilometers) beneath the Pacific Ocean, a massive mountain rises up from the seafloor, say scientists who discovered the seamount using sonar technology.

The seamount is about two-thirds of a mile high (1.1 kilometers), researchers said. Seamounts, rocky leftovers from extinct, underwater volcanoes, are found on ocean floors around the world. The newly discovered seamount is about 186 miles (300 km) southeast of Jarvis Island, an uninhabited island in a relatively unexplored part of the South Pacific Ocean, experts said.

“These seamounts are very common, but we don’t know about them, because most of the places that we go out and map have never been mapped before,” James Gardner, a University of New Hampshire research professor who works at the university’s NOAA Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center, said in a statement.

Gardner’s team found the seamount on Aug. 13, less than five days into an expedition to map the outer limits of the U.S. continental shelf. They used a 12-kHzmultibeam echo sounder, which uses sonar to detect contours on the ocean floor. Late that night, the seamount appeared “out of the blue,” Gardner said in the statement.

The multibeam echo sounder gave the researchers an advantage over other mapping methods. Low-resolution satellite data have revealed images for most of the earth’s seafloor, but the technique is not advanced enough to capture most seamounts.

“Satellites just can’t see these features and we can,” Gardner said.

The researchers have yet to explore the effects of the as-yet-unnamed seamount on the surrounding environment, but these underwater mountains often host diverse marine life, such as commercially important fish species, research finds. However, the newly found seamount is too deep underwater to provide a home for rich fisheries, he said.

Still, because the seamount is so far underwater it won’t be a navigational hazard. The United States has jurisdiction over the volcanic seamount and the waters above it, Gardner added.

“It’s probably 100 million years old,” Gardner said, “and it might have something in it we may be interested in 100 years from now.”

The group made its discovery aboard the R/V Kilo Moana, a 186-foot (57 meter) vessel owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by the University of Hawaii Marine Center.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/47670-pacific-seamount-discovered.html

Strange Find in the Baltic Sea

Shipwreck hunters stumble across mysterious find

By Brooke Bowman, CNN
updated 8:59 AM EST, Mon January 30, 2012

Click to play
Shipwreck hunters make an unusual find

CNN) — Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime.

The problem is, they’re not exactly sure what it is they’ve uncovered.

Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water’s surface.

At first glance, team leader and commercial diver Peter Lindberg joked that his crew had just discovered an unidentified flying object, or UFO.

“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this,” said Lindberg.

“We had been out for nine days and we were quite tired and we were on our way home, but we made a final run with a sonar fish and suddenly this thing turned up,” he continued.

Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long.

The imaging technique involves pulling a sonar “towfish” — that essentially looks sideways underwater – behind a boat, where it creates sound echoes to map the sea floor below.

On another pass over the object, the sonar showed a second disc-like shape 200 meters away.

Lindberg’s team believe they are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck, but it’s anyone’s guess what could be down there.

“We’ve heard lots of different kinds of explanations, from George Lucas’s spaceship — the Millennium Falcon — to ‘it’s some kind of plug to the inner world,’ like it should be hell down there or something.

“But we won’t know until we have been down there,” said Lindberg.

The Head of Archaeology at Sweden’s Maritime Museums, Andreas Olsson, admits he’s intrigued by the picture, but remains sceptical about what it could be.

The reliability of one-side scan sonar images is one of his main concerns, making it difficult to determine if the object is a natural geological formation or something different altogether.

“It all depends on the circumstances when you actually tow the [sonar] fish after the boat,” he said.

“What are the temperature conditions, the wave conditions, how deep is your fish in relation to the sea bed etcetera and all those parameters also affects what kind of image you have in the end,” he explained.

Even Lindberg agrees the image “isn’t the best it could be.” But his crew are still planning to return to the site in the calmer waters of spring to investigate their find.

It’s a risky and expensive business, and not one that always pays off.

British maritime historian, Professor Andrew Lambert, says the costs of recovery are now too high for most.

“If you want to stand in a cold shower tearing up £50 notes, go shipwreck hunting,” he said. “Most shipwrecks are rotting away, or carrying dull things — all the romance has been taken out of it.”

It’s a problem Lindberg and his team are aware of.

“It’s a very difficult industry to be in — it’s money all the time,” he confessed. “The best thing it could be, would be 60 meters of gold — then I would be very happy.”

“This thing is very far out, it’s really off-shore, so first of all we need a bigger ship… more equipment.. and we have to do bottom sampling, water sampling, to see if it is something poisonous.”

But even if the mystery object doesn’t contain retrievable treasure the site could still prove to be a gold mine for the Ocean Explorer team, with tourists and private investors paying to see it up-close, in a submarine.

“The object itself is maybe not valuable in the sense of money it can be very interesting whatever it is, historical or a natural anomaly,” said Lindberg.

In the North Atlantic, one American salvage company is also hoping to beat the odds.

Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long.
Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long.

Odyssey Marine Exploration — a company made up of researchers, scientists, technicians and archaeologists — have at least 6,300 shipwrecks in their database that they are looking to find.

Their latest discoveries include two British war-time shipwrecks off the coast of Ireland that could be laden with hundreds of tonnes of silver.

Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey, says at least 100 ships on their watch-list are known to have values in excess of $50 million dollars.

“When you think about the fact until the mid 20th century, the only way to transport wealth was on the oceans and a lot of ships were lost, it adds up to a formula where we have billions of dollars worth of interesting and valuable things on the sea floor,” he said.

The lure of treasure has lead to an increasing number of discoveries in recent years. But one which doesn’t come without its dangers, warns Olsson.

“I think recently we’re entering a time of a lot of discoveries,” he said of the technological advancements in finding shipwrecks.

“The professional shipwreck discoverers are doing a great effort for cultural heritage management in the long run… what we don’t support is the action of actually taking up items and selling them,” he said.

from:    http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/28/world/europe/swedish-shipwreck-hunters/index.html?iref=allsearch