Sentences with phrase «seafloor rocks»

The organisms likely survive using mechanisms similar to the ever - increasing parade of creatures that have been discovered living in the total darkness of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, deriving energy from minerals in seafloor rocks.

Now, using precise chemical measurements of seafloor rock and moon samples, scientists have shown that nearby supernovas rained down radioactive iron and potentially influenced life on Earth.

Air guns, which are towed by ships, use compressed air to generate sound waves that reflect off seafloor rock formations.

Not exact matches

While hydrothermal activity can produce considerable quantities of hydrogen, in porous rocks often found under seafloors, radiolysis could produce copious amounts as well.

A team of geologists led by David Clague then used a tethered underwater robot, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Doc Ricketts, to dive down to the seafloor, fly around the vents, and collect video and samples of rocks and hot water spewing from the chimneys.

Magma from the mantle forms oceanic crust when it rises from the mantle to the surface at spreading centers and cools into the rock that forms the very bottom of the seafloor.

A single - celled organism lives beneath the seafloor, in rock hotter, deeper and older than any previously known sub-seafloor environment harboring life.

Molten rock rises to within a mile of the surface of the seafloor and forms a magma chamber.

This loose collection of rock and water is what we generally think of as the solid seafloor.

IODP is a collaboration of scientists from 23 countries; the organization coordinates voyages to study the history of the Earth recorded in sediments and rocks beneath the seafloor.

The purpose was to create a bathymetric picture of the sea bottom and to collect reflection seismic data, which allows researchers to peer into the sediments and rocks underneath the seafloor.

They towed cameras above the seafloor, dredged rock samples from promising locales, and went down to have a look whenever they could score access to a submersible.

A large, drum - shaped cutting tool at the end of a long boom will be able to cut up to 6,000 tons of sulfide rock a day from the seafloor, chopping it into nuggets of an inch or less.

The smoke turned out to contain concentrated metal sulfides, which the superheated salt water was drawing out from the volcanic rock under the seafloor.

The one in the seafloor runs 6,000 times faster, and so it captures more detail, but it is less useful than the one in the mountains because we can date the mountain rocks to specific periods of time.

«When you walk on a rock surface, it's like walking on a 565 - million - year - old seafloor,» he says.

In response to a tax on greenhouse - gas emissions imposed by the Norwegian government, each year the company now removes about 1 million tons of CO2 captured as a waste product from the natural gas it recovers and pumps more than 99 percent of it 2,600 feet beneath the seafloor into a porous sandstone formation capped by impervious rock.

The new model calculates the amount of free hydrogen gas produced and stored beneath the seafloor based on a range of parameters — including the ratio of a site's tectonic spreading rate to the thickness of serpentinized rocks that might be found there.

On July 18, 2012, passengers on an airline flight over the Southwest Pacific Ocean glimpsed something unusual — a raft of floating rock known as pumice that indicated an underwater volcanic eruption had occurred on the seafloor northeast of New Zealand.

The team, which included other geochemists, palaeoecologists and geologists from UCL and the universities of Edinburgh, Leeds and Cambridge, as well as the Geological Survey of Namibia, analysed the chemical elemental composition of rock samples from the ancient seafloor in the Nama Group - a group of extremely well - preserved rocks in Namibia that are abundant with fossils of early Cloudina, Namacalathus and Namapoikia animals.

After multiple dives, the research team made two significant discoveries — hundreds of skate egg cases on the seafloor, and in bundles on the rocks surrounding a catshark nursery area.

The scientists estimated oxygen levels by analyzing iron found in shale rock, which was once mud on ancient seafloors.

The rock is an extrusion from a hydrothermal vent, not seafloor sediment.

This picture may be about to change in light of a study of deep - sea rocks and sediments led by John Parkes, a microbiologist at Cardiff University in the U.K.. By visiting oil - drilling projects at two sites in the Pacific in 2002, Parkes and colleagues obtained samples as deep as 400 meters beneath the seafloor.

By Year 1.1 billion, deep - sea hematite - bearing rock found in the Marble Bar chert formation of northwestern Australia indicates that iron - rich water gushed from volcanically heated seafloor vents were able to mix with cooler oxygen - rich seawater (Ohmoto et al, Nature Geoscience, March 15, 2009; PSU press release, and in EurkaAlert; and Sid Perkins, ScienceNews, April 11, 2009).

Together with other Triassic layers these rocks — once a seafloor — were now pushed up thousands of meters to become the dramatic high peaks of the new - born Alps.

Beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, liquid water is heated as it percolates through the rock of the seafloor.

But when this happens, tiny magnetic particles in the rocks near areas where the seafloor is spreading will change direction to line up with the new pole.

«This allows scientists to access rocks that formed far below the seafloor which are not available for study.»

Each year the Orcas return to the area to feed on the abundant supply of salmon, and to rub their bellies on the barnacle - encrusted rocks, pebbles and gravel seafloor at Robson Bight.

«The large rocky promontories of Cape Perpetua and Heceta Head, the productive ocean waters and expansive sandy seafloor environments, mark a unique transition from the nearshore rocky reefs to the north off Seal Rock and the subtidal reefs and kelp forests to south at Cape Arago.

However, several studies suggest that significant amounts of CH4, produced within the Earth's crust (mainly by bacterial and thermogenic processes), are released into the atmosphere through faults and fractured rocks, mud volcanoes on land and the seafloor, submarine gas seepage, microseepage over dry lands and geothermal seeps (Etiope and Klusman, 2002; Etiope, 2004; Kvenvolden and Rogers, 2005).

[4] The ocean's influence extends even to the composition of volcanic rocks through seafloor metamorphism, as well as to that of volcanic gases and magmas created at subduction zones.

Seafloor volcanoes usually emit lobes and sheets of lava during an eruption, rather than explosive plumes of gas, steam, and rock that are ejected from land - based volcanoes.