Ocean chasms swallow volcanoes

7 Dec 2011, 9:20 am   -   Source: SBS Staff, BBC
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British researchers are closer to understanding tsunamis and underwater earthquakes, with sonar images being taken for the first time of the violent seabed below the Pacific Ocean.

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British researchers are closer to understanding tsunamis and underwater earthquakes, with sonar images being taken for the first time of the violent seabed below the Pacific Ocean.

The investigation, which focused on the fault lines and volcanoes that make up the Pacific Ring of Fire, revealed how volcanoes are being slowly dragged one-by-one into trenches in the seabed.

Researchers from Oxford and Durham Universities say volcanoes stand little chance against these chasms which can be as enormous as 11 km deep.

“Its ultimate fate is to be carried down into that trench . . . and carried deep down into the earth,” Oxford University’s Tony Watts told the BBC.

“It cannot avoid it and once that one has gone, there’s another one in the line and it’ll be next.”

These sonar images show is the process of these enormous volcanoes being destroyed.

“You can see the way it’s getting sliced up – these parallel fractures – going in, cutting up this immense mountain as though it were a loaf of bread,”  marine geologist, Lara Kalnins, said.
 

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