Underwater Volcanic Eruption

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When the National Science Foundation's Ridge 2000 program was launched in the late 1990s to study active undersea volcanic activities, researchers chose several areas of interest. One of those is located about 400 miles west of Mexico along a massive volcanic mountain range called the East Pacific Rise. When the U.S. researchers returned to check their seismometers in April 2006, they discovered that several of them were lost, buried under new lava from an underwater eruption. And when they used a deep-diving camera system to see what's had happened, they saw that almost ocean bottom life had disappeared. As says one of the scientists, this was like seeing the 'death and birth of a mid-ocean ridge from all perspectives — geological, biological, geophysical.' But read more…