During a five-week expedition, 12 scientists from Durham University, the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, the Open University, the University of Paris and several institutions in the USA are to deploy several robotic devices that will map individual volcanoes along the tectonic plate boundary that runs down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. Another device will collect rock samples from depths of up
to three kilometres beneath the surface.

It’s hoped that the research will shed light on the formation of underwater volcanoes, which are continually expanding the Earth’s crust along the faultline between the African and North American plates. As these plates are pulled apart by tectonic forces, rocks deep in the mantle are pulled up to fill the gap left behind, forming thousands of volcanoes on the sea floor that eventually cluster into giant ridges, roughly equivalent in size to the Malvern Hills in western England, which are 13 kilometres long and more than 400 metres high.

‘The problem is that we don’t know how fast these volcanoes form or if they all come from melting the same piece of mantle rock,’ said Professor Roger Searle from Durham University. ‘Understanding the processes forming the crust is important, because the whole ocean floor, some 60 per cent of the Earth’s surface, has been recycled and re-formed many times over the Earth’s history.’

August 2008