Undersea Volcano Caught on Camera

Dec. 4, 2007 -- For the first time ever, scientists have the goods on a large volcanic eruption at the bottom of the ocean.

Putting together more than 50,000 sea floor images, along with 10 exploratory dives with the Alvin submarine, an unprecedented map has been pieced together showing 22 million cubic meters (13,670 cubic miles) of new lava coming out of the East Pacific Rise -- a seafloor spreading center off the Pacific coast of Mexico.

The area covered by the recent eruption is equivalent to metropolitan Oklahoma City, or nearly half of Manhattan. The discovery that an eruption was underway, however, was sort of an accident.

"We had an array of seismometers down there that weren't coming back," said marine geophysicist Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. They were, in other words, buried by lava, she explained.

"We had seen increasing seismicity, and we suspected an eruption," she told Discovery News. So when eight of 12 ocean-bottom seismometers went missing in 2006, she instructed her assistants to look for telltale volcanic eruption chemicals in the water. They found them.

That discovery led another team of researchers, led by Adam Soule of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to undertake the dives and take the images to chart the extent of the eruption. Their results are reported in the December issue of the Geological Society of America's journal Geology.