The world is watching one volcano in Bali, but it’s sobering to think there may be hundreds of others going off, and almost certainly ones we don’t even know about. The article Is the Bali volcano making us warmer or cooler? by William F Jasper, reminded me of Ian Plimers words about there being squillions of undersea volcanoes so I found the 2007 paper, by Hillier, that tried to count them. Trying being the appropriate word. Volcanoes are biggish things, but when they are under one or two kilometers of water they are hard to hear, hard to see, and, by crikey, we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Marinara, and it’s only 11km “away”.
People are constantly discovering new volcanoes, like a 3,000m one off Indonesia that no one realized was there til 2010. It turns out the second largest volcano in the solar system is apparently not on Io, but 1,000 miles east of Japan. It’s the size of the British Isles, but who knew? A few months ago a team found 91 new volcanoes under Antarctica. (This is getting serious, someone should talk to the Minister for Lava!)
…
Not only can we not predict when volcanoes will erupt, we don’t even know how many there are
The scope of our ignorance on the sea floor is really something. There are 1,500 active volcanoes on land, but on the sea floor we are still discovering them all the time. at least 39,000 of them rise one kilometer off the sea floor, but there are suspicions there might be up to 3 million, holey moley. The Hilliers paper estimates that 24,000 submarine volcanoes were not yet discovered in 2007. Wikimedia is trying to list them. Good luck.
Does hot magma leaking into the oceans that we havent measured and don’t know about, change the currents, the temperature, and eventually our weather? If it’s a bit hotter at one end of a trench than the other, does the water flow alter? Has the big ball of magma got anything at all to do with ENSO/AMO long term trends? Your guess is better than a Global Climate Model.
So here is the closest thing we have to kind of being “A Map”.
…Hilliers 2007
Is the Bali volcano making us warmer or cooler?
I don’t think there is any chance the Bali volcano will be warming the world. But undersea volcanoes are releasing a lot of greenhouse gases. Time to tax them?
William F Jasper
Many of the undersea volcanoes are regularly oozing molten lava, as well as CO2, methane, and other gases. In addition there are untold thousands — perhaps millions — of undersea “vents” that are regularly discharging gases, oil, and tar. Last year researchers found hundreds of new vents along the west coast of the United States. “Scientists have found 500 seabed vents bubbling methane into the Pacific Ocean off the United States, roughly doubling the number of known U.S. seeps of the powerful greenhouse gas,” an October 19, 2016 Reuters story reported.
“Methane naturally escapes from the sea floor in many places around the world and can stoke global warming if it reaches the atmosphere,” the Reuters article continued. “Worldwide, scientists are trying to see if rising ocean temperatures cause more leaks. ‘It appears that the entire coast off Washington, Oregon and California is a giant methane seep,’ Robert Ballard, who is famed for finding the wreck of the Titanic and has now discovered the 500 new seeps, said in a statement. ‘The discoveries double to about 1,000 the number of such vents now known to exist along the continental margins of the USA,’ the statement said.”
Supervolcanoes might happen more often than we thought:
As it happens, this week a new study came out showing The Next Big One may be sooner than we think. Though we have no idea when, but we used to think they were 45,000- 700,000 years apart. But now some new researchers think the new best guess is somewhere from 5,000 – 48,000 years. If the Big-One goes off, forget carbon, forget climate, forget a whole continent.
Jonathan Rougier, Professor of Statistical Science, said the best guess value is “17 thousand years.”
According to geological records, the two most recent super-eruptions were between 20 and 30 thousand years ago.
The good Prof is careful to keep politically correct priorities in order:
On that basis, Professor Rougier says there is little need to plan now for a super-eruption, especially with many other pressing issues to address, which will affect the current and the next generation of humans.
Nothing to see here.
Though if you like, you can check out this volcano map.
Abstract, Hilliers 2007
[1] The distribution of submarine volcanoes, or seamounts, reflects melting within the Earth and how the magma generated ascends through the overlying lithosphere. Globally (±60° latitude), we use bathymetry data acquired along 39.5 × 106 km of ship tracks to find 201,055 probable seamounts, an order of magnitude more than previous counts across a wider height-range (0.1 < h < 6.7 km). In the North Pacific, seamounts’ spatial distribution substantially reflects ridge-crest conditions, variable on timescales of 10 s of Ma and along-ridge distances of ∼1,000 km, rather than intra-plate hot-spot related volcanic activity. In the Atlantic, volcano numbers decrease, somewhat counter-intuitively, towards Iceland suggesting that abundant under-ridge melt may deter the formation of isolated volcanoes. Neither previously used empirical curve (exponential or power-law) describes the true size-frequency distribution of seamounts. Nevertheless, we predict 39 ± 1 × 103 large seamounts (h > 1 km), implying that ∼24,000 (60%) remain to be discovered.
Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2007GL029874)
REFERENCE
- J. Rougier, S. Sparks, K. Cashman, and S. Brown. (2017) The global magnitude-frequency relationship for large explosive volcanic eruptions. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, (in press)
- Hillier, J. K., and A. B. Watts (2007), Global distribution of seamounts from ship-track bathymetry data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L13304, doi:10.1029/2007GL029874.
- Plimer, I. R., 2009, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, 503 pp., ISBN13: 978-1-9214-2114-3
The main problem always boils down to what we don’t know we don’t know.
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I know that I don’t know, what I don’t know, and I don’t even know what I do know with any certainty. That is the nature of science.
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Thats what I like about you, Rereke, your crystal clear, relevant and logical thought process.:))
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Yes but a healthy dose of vintage Whitehall thrown in…which is a rather solid Sir Humphrey “Yes Minster” response…… 🙂
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Please allow me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk
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He’s a good thinker. By knowing what he doesn’t know he can come to know about it. Then he will know what he didn’t know and add that knowing to what he knows, knowing that he doesn’t not know about it anymore.
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Quite.
20
I did a course once that dealt with competence. The Stages are
Unconsciously incompetent – You don’t know what you don’t know
Consciously incompetent – You DO know what you don’t know
Consciously competent – You know but have to think about it consciously
Unconsciously competent – You know without thinking about it.
Think about driving, where you go from the dangerous child stage where you think you can drive because you don’t know what it takes, through to a fully competent driver that can pretty much drive on automatic.
Climate science is still at the dangerous Unconsciously Incompetent child stage. They’ve seen some things and think they can get behind the wheel but mostly they don’t know what they don’t know. Volcanoes, Chemistry, Losses, Thermodynamics, Ohms Law, Geometry, Mathematics, Conservation of Energy are all things many of the environmental scientists making up the climate cabal can’t/don’t do.
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The “Unconsciously Competent” stage is where the wheels can come off all too easily. You glance at something and a perception emerges so quickly you are unaware of what you observed that lead to the conclusion. If you do not persistently and stubbornly insist on inventorying the evidence consciously, you may not be able to either support your opinion or more importantly identify errors in your quick assessment.
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Rereke, I know exactly what you mean, though I have not yet determined the experimental error margins, and thee is quite a lot of uncertainty about my hypothesis.
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Who knows?
What we can know, is that when NASA tells us what Mt Agung might or could do in the next five years when Mt Agung is doing nothing particularly unusual, that all of the cooling we can point to in the next five years is going to be attributed to Mt Agung.
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The climate scientologist and warming worriers at this point have their fingers in their ears, eyes are closed and they are going la, la,la, la, la….
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But the smarter ones are thinking “This might be my way out”. Claiming that you didn’t know about this ‘extra source of heat’ is a sort of “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE” card for those who move quickly as they have to establish some support soon. “We didn’t know” has no validity as a defence in future if you ignore it when the evidence appears. Look for a small number of speculative papers in the more obscure journals in the coming months along the lines “Does the new evidence explain some of the recent warming?” etc.
The dumb ones will stumble on blindly to their doom as the tempeatures drop.
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Also what some don’t want to know, and only know what is known to be false.
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In the short term, volcanoes matter, but any extra [CO2] produces no net warming because that is exactly offset by other negative feedbacks to ensure constant planetary radiation entropy production rate, the basis of all open thermodynamic control systems.
Sit back and watch her blow!
10
??
I think I get it now. All that stuff about carbon dioxide, that’s the Carbonara, right?
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At the bottom of the Marinara is the crust. Below the crust is the pizza pie tin.
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…..and ladies and gents, this is where we get agua minerale from….. 🙂
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No argu-magma here…..unless its from authority.
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97% of volcanoes might agree with you…. 🙂
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The US Navy isn’t doing much at the moment, other than hanging around North Korea.
It and the Chinese Navy both have these big submarines spread over both sides of the Pacific. Most of the American ones are on the western side of the Pacific and most of the Chinese ones are on the eastern side watching Governor Brown in California.
Between those two fleets, they could do a lot of valuable research in finding submarine volcanoes like the USS San Francisco did back in 2005.
I would suggest the research be done a little more carefully than this discovery of the then uncharted sea mount. One American sailor died.
It could be put to the two navies that they could use the research as an exercise in detecting and following each other. The children need to be kept amused 🙂
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Is it in fact feasible for military submarines to chart undersea volcanoes? They would need to use active sonar to do that and that is normally switched off because it would disclose their location.
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Active volcanoes would be gassing; along with other vents. That makes noise.
Passive “hydrophones” ought to do the trick.
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Right, you’ve just given the two navies another task: first: work out how to spot undersea volcanoes both active and dormant from a submarine without running into them.
Once they have it worked out, they go to work on their second task: mapping them
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Who knew that underwater volcanoes had anything to do with pasta genesis?
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Deep hydrosphere? Lithosphere? Asthenosphere? Bo-ring (except the atmosphere when it’s for social justice ‘n stuff).
Every dollar and hour spent on researching the obscure planet Earth is keeping us from our main business, which is Mars. Mars mining, Mars tourism, Mars colonies, Mars Bars…you know you need them.
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Mars needs guitars….
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Yep all the government departments of climate change state and federal have been
working hard at solving a non problem for decades now how noble??? Yet people
are still suffering from cancer and other diseases that desperately need research funding
at the same time —-ah so what!!!
I remember at the time when it was the height of the Rudd government that the department of
climate change had rented its office building for a steal at only $100 million and while it was feverishly solving “”the greatest moral problem of our time “ none of these high minded public
servants never decided it was necessary to catch the freely available “ carbon footprint “ reducing shuttle bus
to Canberra ‘s airport in order to fly off in a fossil fuel jet to help some needy climate change
refugee either at home or around the world somewhere.And Oh how at the time I was so impressed by the sheer sincerity and dedication to their tireless efforts to “save the planet”
Cheers Mike Reed
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Yes, Michael.
A non-problem can have no solution, by definition. For how can you solve a problem that does not exist?
If people stopped demanding that money be spent on problems that do not exist, then those problems would simply go away, and everybody would be better off.
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Remember Victor Borge’s uncle, who “invented the cure for which there was no disease”.
Sounds like these days he’d likely get a government research grant to look for (or invent)the disease
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Another Ian,
The same uncle of VB also invented 6 Up – just one short.
He also invented the burglar alarm, but it was stolen.
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Exactly. Nicely put Rereke.
More proof the solutions to the `non-problem’ are wrong 🙂
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“If people stopped demanding that money be spent on problems that do not exist, then those problems would simply go away, and everybody would be better off.”
Not “everybody.” Those who benefit from the crisis industry would not be better off, which is why they work so hard trying to make as many people as possible believe that these problems do exist and keep demanding money to fix them. The circle goes round in a propaganda-orama.
Not sure how many trillion dollars the latest estimate is for ‘fixing’ the climate but with that kind of money there’s a lot of people riding this lucrative bandwagon.
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Good point – nay, excellent point, and well made.
Unfortunately, I tend to assume that people are rational beings. As a result, I am constantly being disappointed.
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If ~ 98% of earths co2 is stored in the oceans then how much co2 comes from atmospheric absorption and how much from submarine volcanic activity?
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Not to mention the heat from the volcano would be driving the dissolved CO2 out of the surrounding water.
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Its worse than we thought…..there’s the fact co2 emits from the ground in supposed inactive areas which can be basically everywhere else a volcano isn’t, an example from a commenter on WUWT,
The whole carbon cycle does not depend on volcanoes alone to recycle
the CO2 trapped in limestone deep in the earth. At great depth, heat, pressure
and water convert the minerals to hydrocarbons, mostly natural gas.
This is easily observed by a simple test. I use an anemometer, thermometer,
a 14″ stainless steel salad bowl, a 10 lb rock, and an inexpensive CO2
meter which allows for lengthy exposure readings.
On my last observation, the wind was less than 2 mph, the ambient C02
reading was 404 ppm. I put the meter on the ground in an area which has
dark brown topsoil approximately 12″ deep and the grass had been cut short.
I then inverted the ss bowl over the CO2 meter and placed the 10 lb rock
on top of the bowl.
12 hours later, I retrieved the meter and recorded the CO2 reading. It was
961 PPM.
There’s a hell of a lot of natural mechanisms occurring on this planet, inferring anthropogenic activity is the prime driver of climate is selective epidemiology at its best.
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Now there is an easily repeatable experiment for all you science buffs to try. See if the results are reproduced and write up your conclusions. Probably the only place you will get published is in Jo Nova but it could be fun and grant requirements are not very high.
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… and neither are the grants 🙂
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Yes, I will grant you that.
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I could provide a free pot and rock Just send 29.99 postage and handling. The rest you can rent and use as a tax deduction.
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Robert Felix, on iceagenow.info, was writing about underwater volcanos several years ago, and I remember thinking at the time how lucky we were that they could be left out of the climate modeling.
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Science Daily spelled it out in 2015, its the best kept secret on the planet.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205142921.htm
———-
Jo posed the question: ‘Has the big ball of magma got anything at all to do with ENSO/AMO long term trends?’
Probably not ENSO, but the PDO and AMO are candidates because of their regularity.
—
[Top Stuff El Gordo. Very interesting paper. Ta! — Jo]
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That’s absolutely fascinating El Gordo…thanks.
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Interesting El gordo as the Earth will be at its Perihelion, the closest point of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun for this orbit on January 3rd 2018 @ 5.35 hrs GMT.
The Aphelion for this orbit will be July 6th 2018 @ 16.47 hrs GMT
The Perihelion and the Aphelion of the Earth’s orbit varies by quite a lot each orbit due to the gravitational influences of the Moon, the other planets, the Sun and etc although on Cosmological scales it is minute.
The present orbit’s” Perihelion,” our SH’s summer, will be 845 kms inside of the mean orbit and the “Aphelion”, the NH’s summer, will be 2129 kms inside of the oebit mean
Conversely , the 2017 orbit’s” Perihelion” on Jan 4th 4.18Hrs GMT was 2919 kms outside of the mean orbit and the “Aphelion” was 5190 kms inside of the mean orbit distance at July 3rd 2017 @ 20.11 hrs GMT
The “Perihelion” is also the point of the maximum velocity of the earth around the Sun for that orbit .
Up to ther point where the Earth reaches this upcoming “Perhelion”on Jan 3rd, the Earth has been accelerating in velocity from the “Aphelion” of the orbit until it reaches “Periphilion” after which it again slightly decelerates in velocity as it cruises towards another “Aphelion “.
And then does it all over again.
Jupiter’s Moon Europa is believed to possibly have liquid water under its icy shell due primarily to the immense gravitational forces that both accelerate and decelerate Europa in its orbit and which also constantly deforming Europa very slightly leading to vast amounts of heat being generated due to Jupiters immense gravitational pull and the consequent internal tidal generated frictions on Europa’s geology.
So with a constantly changing orbit for Earth and the probability of some heat or magnetic changes always under way , it certainly is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are regular bursts of volcanic activity here on Earth all triggered by tidal forces created by the Sun’s gravity and the Moon’s gravity and the gravitational effects of the giant planets leading to tidal forces here on. earth creating enough distortion and tensions inside of the planet’s liquid core to generate volcanic activity at quite specific points in the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
On land “the semidiurnal amplitude of terrestrial tides can reach about 55 cm at the equator”. ie ; The Earth’s land surfaces at the equator can move up and down by up to 55 cm’s , half a metre, which gives the GPS controllers another lot of factors to deal with.
So there is a lot of movement on what we think of as the completely immoveable surface of the Earth. and that itself leads to heating effects from tidal friction on Earth’s geology.
And of course the Solar tidal forces acting on the ocean floor plus the water pressure changes from the Solar and moon created tidal forces are probably at least as much in amplitude as the forces on the non oceanic surfaces of the planet.
——————
The Table for Earth at Perihelion and Aphelion: 2001 to 2050; Greenwich Mean Time (GMT
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This is one of the forgotten energy sources/sinks that I occasionally go on about. Take a wire bend it back and forth and what happens – it gets hot.
The Constant flexing of the earth by gravity takes energy out of the gravitational field and transfers it to the earth AND earth’s climate.
The Gravitational Potential energy of the earth is 800 Billion times the annual influx of solar isolation. The difference in potential and kinetic energy states between apogee and perigee is much, much more than the energy in starlight from the sun. If just a fraction of that leaks into the climate (or escapes from it) then there is a major effect on the radiative balance. This is one of the reasons why the basic idea in climate science that IR radiation out = Solar radiation in – is just complete NONSENSE.
40
I’ve noticed a small hot-spot in the sea-surface temps map that appears just before an El Nino. It’s just off the S tip of the Californian Peninsular (which is actually Mexico). A weakness associated with the subduction zone might be creating a warm plume which would rise to the surface and spread out causing a region of warm wet ascending air.
Just a thought.
20
Taking this a little further, its clear to see the global warming of last century was due to natural variables.
‘Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century: “cool” PDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while “warm” PDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990’s. Shoshiro Minobe has shown that 20th century PDO fluctuations were most energetic in two general periodicities, one from 15-to-25 years, and the other from 50-to-70 years.’
http://ingrid.ldeo.columbia.edu/%28/home/alexeyk/mydata/TSsvd.in%29readfile/.SST/.PDO/
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Ooops ….
http://research.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
30
A lot of factors were left out of climate modelling.
In real modelling, another irrelevant factor would have been placed in the black box: Carbon Dioxide.
Important factors like the complex diurnal bulge were totally ignored.
A proper assessment of mass, heat and momentum transfer was never done.
Why bother when they had created enough junk science to fool all those who needed to be fooled.
KK
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… especially Solar factors. The IPCC is obsessed with TSI because it can be claimed to have no effect because it doesn’t change. The changes in Solar Magnetic Activity and the consequent modulation of our planet’s exposure to Cosmic Rays and their modulation of the planet’s cloud cover (Svensmark’s hypothesis) could then be overlooked in their search for the Anthropogenic Footprint. It’s a bit like Crop Circles 🙂
Nah, BigFoot!
110
Crop circles have a seasonal trend.
30
What is the trend with forces N, D and X?
Neither up nor down from what I can tell.
11
I should have added this http://joannenova.com.au/2016/06/new-science-25-seven-possible-ways-the-sun-could-change-our-cloud-cover/#comment-1808953
11
I like ‘OHC depletion from insufficient TSI’, but no comment on N, D and X.
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Hello Gee Aye,
Glad you dropped in, and I am glad you referenced that particular post from Joanne.
It gives you the opportunity to respond to my comment on that thread:
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I’ll give it a go…
but explain this too
do they ignore it or not? Do they dismiss it? Is having a PhD somehow important in this? Have you covered the literature to see what research has been published and therefore can you back up the ignore claim?
You then make up a reason for them ignoring it apparently they don’t know about the cycles of the sun. And because the sun is cyclical and that climate change is cyclical then what??? You then make no sense.
Something that affects climate is cyclical therefore that excludes anything else from explaining global temperature increase? If that is what you are saying, no I disagree with that statement and also disagree that solar influences have been ignored.
10
Go away do some study (book learnin) on the subject and in 10 years when you have some semblance of knowledge in the subject get back to me .
Right now your talking absolute nonsense (as per usual) we are in oz and those months are summer poindexter .
Who da thought you’d be an expert in crop circles and tin foil hat making .
10
thanks again Robert. I was writing to Rereke specifically.
your interruptions are always amusing in a cartoonish sort of way
20
Would that have anything to do with the seasonal trend of crops? Correlation is NOT causation …
and TSI is not TSI … what’s seen even by the SORCE satellite (which is supposed to measure the TSI accurately) is an atmospheric transformation effect.
It also goes someway to explaining why/how the sky is blue 🙂
40
In the UK its referred to as the Crop Circle Season because it only happens in summer.
20
If you walked out into a field in winter there would be bugger all growth to flatten with your crop flattening shoes, and you’d lose your normal shoes in the mud on the way into the crop.
51
It at least partly coincides with the ‘Silly Season’ also.
20
Not necessarily so… there are winter vegetables which are planted in autumn and harvested in early or late spring. Broad beans, asparagus, garlic etc.
30
Further proof the leaf knows nothing about farming .
“”If you walked out into a field in winter there would be bugger all growth to flatten with your crop flattening shoes, and you’d lose your normal shoes in the mud on the way into the crop.”
How’s the book going scooter ?
31
Gee Aye alluded to “crop flattening shoes”
I think the crop circle creators used planks of wood with a rope handle on each end to trample the growth. Big shoes at a metre or more long.
40
Do you all believe crop circles are human induced?
20
Sorry Robert but as it happens I worked in areas with crop fields that were used for creating patterns by humans with planks on their feet, and worked with agricultural scientists in those areas and so I know about the rotations they use and no, they are either fallow, green manure or grazed and would not be suitable for circles. It’s possible they might grow something suitable for making a circle but it would be rare.
11
Sophocles… yes, I used he term shoes for effect.
21
Which totally proves you know nothing about farming or winter crops , blending kale and wheatgrass for a smoothly does not make you a farmer and because your unfamiliar with farming let me fill you in on a crop that does grow and is planted in winter and could easily be vandalised for crop circles .
It’s called winter oats mate we grew it to keep the cows in milk while improved pastures are dormant thru the start of winter , there are other crops but don’t want to bore you on a subject you already know about .
10
yeah winter wheat too
11
OK… I just did a check of growth… so Robert, in December-January how far above the knees would you say the winter oat has grown, using knee height as a minimum requirement for making a useful circle without exposing the inward trail of the circle makers?
21
No one can count or could know,
The number of seamounts that blow,
Spewing gases and oil,
Making seawater boil,
Adding juvenile H2O.
140
It is very telling that alarmists care little about natural processes that may affect climate, possibly significantly, and probably over riding anything we humans can do. Why? Because there’s no money or social restructuring in it.
170
Correct.
Leftists by definition are trouble makers, and need a crack to exploit ( like water ) to create a bigger problem. This is why they create protests to “justify” taking “action” ( leftists cause du jour ).
Underneath it all, they are just bored twits I think.
30
My thought is that the alarmists are fully aware that the out of control catastrophic warming that they have being constantly warning us about for decades just isn’t happening. What is more, I think that it is slowly dawning on them that it isn’t going to happen any time soon. So we have had the kicking of these catastrophies into the long grass of a hundred years into the future. Volcanoes have a well documented cooling effect so any well publicised eruption can be latched onto as an excuse for the lack of catastrophic warming.
150
.
As the old proffessor said to the young ‘consensus’ believing student.
.”When you can demonstrate to me that you can control a volcano then we can sit down and discuss your ideas for controlling the Earth’s climate”
150
Ah! That explains a lot.
I was wondering where all the virgins had gone …
60
No NZ virgins are involved in the control of volcanoes as they can’t find any virgins there.
81
Lambs?
50
All taken by the Ockers, I’m afraid. They seem to like them young.
60
.
Touche!
20
Oi, Oi, Oi!
30
Yeah for consumption 🙂
20
They all emigrated to Australia “raising the average IQ of both countries.”
(Sir Robert Muldoon, a notable NZ PM sometime in the 1980s) 🙂
20
Ahhh now there was a man. They didn’t call him Piggy because of sheep either.
20
The man’s world was viewed from within either a vodka or a whisky bottle.
I can’t remember which.
20
If 40,000 volcanoes were 40,000 cli-scientists,
why, they’d be a consensus.
20
The changing sea floor, the bulging and flexing of the plates etc will also have an effect on sea level.
30
Why? And How?
20
Wouldn’t lava outflows displace the ocean leading to some increase in sea level? Or similarly, crustal displacement upwards from undersea quakes may do the same, for example that huge one near Banda Aceh in 2004 caused a massive uplift. An increase in sea floor height must lead to a commensurate rise in sea level surely?
20
Well, the level of water in a bucket depends on the amount of water and the size of the bucket.
10
Yes, you get it. I asked the question, because “sea level” is the datum reference, for all other basic measurements of height, assuming that the volume of free water on our planet is near enough constant as to be insignificant. Submarine volcanoes, et al, may displace some of the water, but sea level is always sea level, by definition.
11
Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Add a (submerged) mass to a bucket of water and you displace an equivalent mass of water. The level must then rise relative to the side of the bucket. Yes, sea level is a datum relative to the gravitational surface, but it varies relative to its bucket. Just because the mass added is at the bottom of the bucket doesn’t change the physics surely?
00
I’ve always been bemused by the fact that we have El-Niño/La-Niña cycles in the Pacific with the onset of warming coinciding with the “ring of fire” on the western continental shelf of the Americas and yet underwater volcanoes are never considered a potential source of the warming.
Volcanism is cyclic with pressure build up, release and build up in a relentless cycle so why is it not extremely likely the whole El-Niño/La-Niña cycle is entirely driven by Earth’s inner heat ?
My point of view is it is extremely likely all deep ocean warming is volcanic.
Don’t climate scientists tell us that human CO2 induced melting ice in Iceland is likely to cause more volcanism because the reduced ice mass means a reduction in pressure over the active volcanic areas ?
If we accept this as feasible then the fact that water is only 2/3’s or less of the density of continental land masses and the crust is “floating” on a viscous hot “liquid” means there is significantly less pressure on the crust, and the viscous hot “liquid”, under the oceans than under land masses, which often rise thousands of metres above sea level, and therefore the number of sites where the crust fractures and eruptions occur is likely many times the number of land based volcanoes.
Why isn’t this the most likely cause of ocean warming and CO2 release to the atmosphere ?
150
‘My point of view is it is extremely likely all deep ocean warming is volcanic.’
You might be right, but your hypothesis needs more data to back it up.
20
Is it possible volcanoes heat the water, release CO2, but its so deep the extreme pressure forces the CO2 back into water again, for close to zero net effect?
41
some of those submarine volcanoes are kilometers in height above the sea floor. When one is active, there is a hot water plume. Hot water is like hot air—it rises.
50
I guess where I was going with that was that submarine volcanoes, due to depth and pressure, may not account for much in the way of CO2 release – if – the depth pressure forces the CO2 back into the water?
Dont know much about such things, hence maybe someone could elaborate?
30
It’s an experiment begging to be done, I guess.
10
Rosco:
you could start here
30
Rosco,
There should be no confusion about why Iceland has over 100 active volcanoes.
http://www.iceland.is/the-big-picture/nature-environment/volcanoes
Iceland has a unique geological location on top of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, a divergent plate boundary between the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate which provides the mechanism for continental drift. That is why the island has so many active volcanoes. It has bugger all to do with melting ice. As Rereke says below: “total bullocks”.
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Perhaps.
However, it’s also likely that they’ve got the cart before the horse again. The cause confused with the effect:
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/10/24/Study-links-rapid-ice-sheet-melting-with-distant-volcanic-eruptions/9001508874180/?st_rec=6551512394858
Or there are many processes involved, with the alarmists only promoting the one that aligns with their CO2 bias.
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You are much too kind.
I would say that the horse, wasn’t a horse at all, but rather total bullocks.
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A kind sceptic?
I doubt such a beast exists. 😉
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‘Why isn’t this the most likely cause of ocean warming and CO2 release to the atmosphere ?’
In West Antarctica perhaps, but in the abysmal deep the CO2 might not reach the surface. Have you heard of carbon sinks?
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Is the bottom of the Marinara anywhere near the Mariana?
A little bell tells me that somebody has been there lately. I remember following Jaques Piccard in the National Geographic with the Bathyscaphe Trieste 50 odd years ago.
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The “Challenger Deep” at 10, 923 metres is the deepest point in the global oceans and is found in the “Mariana’s Trench ” which is a Subduction Zone Trench, one of the Plates that makes up the Earth’s constantly changing surface, is sliding down and under another plate.
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The Pacific Plate is the subducting one …it’s subducting under the small Mariana Plate which is on the edge of the Philippines plate … more into here
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Volcanoes’ lives matter.
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“Buried in the depths of the oceans, over a million enormous underwater volcanoes puncture the seabed.”
Newsweek:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/04b89df8-d23d-398d-9297-0fc9549b73d4/ss_'sounds-of-the-ocean'-include.html
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Say what? Someone should have stopped him at that point by giving him a good slap with a cold herring. Temperatures at volcanic vents are in the many hundreds of degrees, but somebody thinks general ocean temps varying by 0.1 degrees or less might cause more of them? Where do they find these people?
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Ah, a rhetorical question:
At JCU and other institutions of offensive learning.
Academic my dear Hart.
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Great post Jo, we should be asking (and slightly worried) about what forces in the universe perturb volcanoes.
As the wise know, we always need to be more humble. When we start to believe we actually know anything we become dangerous to our own survival.
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The largest volcano on Earth is Hawaii’s “Mauna Kea” at 4,205 metres above sea level .
It is also the highest when measured from the sea floor and “Mauna Kea” is 10,000 metres high [ 33,000 feet ]
.
The highest volcano on Earth as measured from sea level is “Ojos del Salado” @ 6,893 metres [ 22,615 feet ] Argentina/Chile – Highest active volcano on Earth
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And the highest and largest Volcano in the Solar system is;
Mar’s, “Olympus Mons” which rises some 21, 287 metres above the datum and 26 kms above the surrounding plain.
Its base is about 600 kms wide.
———
And the most active volcanic province in the solar system is on Jupiter’s moon “Io”
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They get perturbed at the thought of being taxed. Serve them right, I say! Let them pay their fair share towards climate whatever …
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Bit of an ask to collect tax money at that depth….
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Not my problem.
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Yes Mark.D The forces and energies that keep the internals of planets molten are not yet understood, nor are the main causes yet on the horizon in main stream science.
Clever people have described the causes of even volcanoes and how easy they are to predict, but the main stream ignores them. The causes of our warm periods, cold periods
even ice ages are explainable by alternate science but it is a bit like like AGW no one in the main stream wants to know as it takes away their living.
Our wonderful world is kept warm from the inside out, the sun gives us our seasons and keeps our atmosphere in a state of flux for storms rain and sunny days.
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Remember the “Blob” off the coast of the Pacific Northwest of the US?
Volcano anyone?
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Perhaps Axial Sea Mount? (this page from 2015). The blob looked to be to the south west of Axial. It’s been erupting on and off for the last few years so that could be where its hot water plume may have surfaced.
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Has anybody mentioned the big eruption at Lake Taupo in the North Island of New Zealand around about 600 AD (CE)? It was a monster according to the information that is displayed there. That was about 1400 years ago. Apparently Krakatoa was a baby by comparison.
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The Taupo eruption you’re thinking about was c. 230 A.D. Yes, it was a monster blast.
more info here
It covered most of the North Island in a deep pumice blanket. Kupe sailed down from Polynesia somewhen about 600AD, took a look and went back home.
“Nothing to see, move along.”
It wasn’t until about 1300A.D that settlement got well under way.
The Taupo volcanic field runs from Mt Egmont (to the SW of Lake Taupo) north east up and through Rotorua to White Island (off the coast to the NE) and underpins the region known as the “Bay of Plenty.”
NZ generates about 13% of its electrical power (Geothermal Generation) from that volcanic zone.
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Gee, when I muck up, I do it well. This is a response to John Karajas at #18
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This time it wasn’t my keyboard but the keyboard operator 🙂
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Thank you for correcting the date and for the additional information, Sophocles. The Lake Taupo activity is certainly a good example of how important volcanoes are in affecting our planet.
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Combine the number of underwater volcanoes with this graphic showing the difference in heat capacity of oceans vs air….
https://twitter.com/GillesnFio/status/937822081118605313
The University of Oregon thinks there could be 1M such volcanoes — Post by Ice Age Now:
https://www.iceagenow.info/one-million-underwater-volcanoes-oregon-state-university/
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Many if not by far the majority of the Pacific islands are of volcanic origin. The coral atolls are tops of submarine volcanoes.
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And when it comes to volcanoes, Australia doesn’t really rate a mention EXCEPT-
.
Cosgrove Track: Scientists Discover World’s Longest Chain of Continental Volcanoes
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Typical Aussies – Your hot track just has to be bigger and longer than anybody else’s hot track.
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You can take that as read.
The claim that ours is bigger than yours, stands as above!
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There there RW. Have Tasmania as a consolation.
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Well, we have the Big Lobster**, the Big Merino, the Big Banana etc. so why shouldn’t we have the biggest hot spot?
** Actually billed as the big Crayfish, or is that the wrong way round?
But what are they compared with the Rotorua district?
O/T but in the 1970’s there was a deal of thought that the tidal forces on the earth by the sun and moon were possible sources of earthquakes, to the point that charts were prepared for the dangerous months to be in seimic prone areas. From memory August was a quiet month, but as I was born in that month it was probably thought further earth shattering events were superfluous.
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Thanks for that ROM. Interesting.
I visited Mt Gambier summer of 1991 and wandered up it, around and all over it. The green and blue lakes were the same colours as the ones here in Rotorua (NZ) (also a tourist attraction). They disappointed me at first, because they were very much smaller than the Rotorua ones. But then I had a good look at the mountain itself and wandered around it. It seemed very similar to the scoria cones we have across Auckland.
I stopped at the Grampians on my way back to Melbourne and walked up to the public viewing point at the eastern end. I saw a well eroded and very old looking scoria cone some ten or twenty kays away or more due east. I wondered then about a volcanic hot spot and had this one drifted across the Tasman because, apart from the Grampians, Mt Gambier and that second scoria cone looked just like those here in Auckland.
I haven’t done any looking at all about that postulated hot spot, and pretty much forgot about it after reading how Australia’s motion is almost directly due north. Now your info has satisfactorily scratched that itch for me.
Thank you.
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sophocles:
Check out the Camperdown volcanic area in SW Victoria.
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“by crikey, we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Marinara, and it’s only 11km “away”.”
Um… Is that anywhere near the Mariana Trench? 🙂
I find it strange indeed that the true believers can listen/watch the priests of AGW trot out ever-new ‘factoids’ and they never stop to wonder how this could be happening decades after the ‘science is settled’ comments.
It’s an interesting phenomenaI also saw in the Pentecostal Church in which I grew up. Some very smart people could not connect outside facts with their beliefs.
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Whereas there are other who always can. The Pentecostals just need to change their denomination.
https://www.ucg.org/the-good-news/seven-prophecies-that-must-be-fulfilled-before-jesus-christs-return
Either that, or join the church of the wholly United Alarmists. They continue to believe whether it’s hot, cold, wet or dry. It’s all a message from Gaia for them.
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Good one Jo: “the Minister for Lava!”
That seems why 40,000 volcanoes don’t matter as much as SUVs, etc. No empires to be built on ‘fighting’ them.
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OT but here’s one that’s sure to bring a face palm to a few , the new tesla battery in south Australia apart from being able to do wonderfull things it can also generate electricity the search for perpetual motion has been discovered .
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-05/yes-sa-battery-is-a-massive-battery-but-it-can-do-more/9227288
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Well Robert, I gritted my teeth and had a look.
What an echo chamber it is. Ignorance in spades. Nothing but a green-left Labor Party institution.
Not one of the commentators made the point that batteries do not “generate” power.
No wonder South Australia (and Victoria) are destined for power outages.
Perpetual motion? More like perpetual green-left stupidity.
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Ahh but it does have a total generation capacity of 100 megawatts, also noticed it was labeled an option piece .
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SS: I too wonder at the mentality on offer. The absolute ignorance of people thinking that the new solar heat plant will supply electricity hour in, hour out, day in, day out all the year is baffling (to me). Have they never wondered how a source of energy for part of the day (sometimes) can supply energy 24 hours a day?
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More OT this time high tides in Sydney while not being blamed on CAGW there is a quip about it .
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-05/sydney-king-tide-hits-botanical-gardens/9228644
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People are constantly discovering new volcanoes
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If you have seen one volcano, then you have seen them all.
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Nevermind volcanoes. This has been a bad day in Southern California. We’re trying to burn down everything we can if you watch the news coverage. Before dark I could see three big smoke plumes around us to the north and northwest with more smaller fires reported. Several hundred homes have been destroyed as santa ana winds blow the fire around like a blowtorch. Ventura where my wife grew up from middle school on is threatened with numerous houses on the hillside above town destroyed and the wind still trying to blow the fire down into town.
Her brother is on the county search and rescue team and he was out all night trying to evacuate the City of Ojai ahead of the fire (pronounced Oh-high, spanish spelling of an indian name). Ojai is one of the most picturesque places anywhere around.
I wonder how much CO2 many tens of thousands of acres of burning brush and hundreds of burning buildings will add to the atmosphere. And I’m supposed to worry about the exhaust from my car?
Jerry Brown, wake up. Take your high speed train and electric cars and stuff them where they’ll do you the most good. You should have been preparing the state for just such an event as this instead of playing savior to a planet that doesn’t need saving. This kind of wind with low humidity is common in Southern California. And in spite of all the rain that barely ended the drought everything is bone dry in the fall and is nothing more than a bomb waiting to go off. And you should have known and no doubt did know about the fire danger but did nothing where it was your job to act.
You should have been seeing to it that the Oroville dam and all our flood control measures were in good shape before the inevitable rain came. Instead you’ve been AWOL through your first 8 years as governor and now AWOL through every last second of your current adminstration. I don’t know words strong enough to condemn you.
—————————————————
Please, if you pray, pray for my beautiful Golden State.
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I hope it is controlled and damage is minimal
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Will do Roy. Thoughts and prayers that everyone comes through this. As with the Black Saturday firestorm here where I now live, the Greenies were blamed for the amount of fuel available that made it so very bad. People don’t learn though, there’s uncleared brush everywhere again, just waiting for the next bad set of conditions.
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Reason 5278 why I am glad I escaped from the once golden state. It has fallen to where total madness seems like good old fashion common sense by comparison. I would recommend that anyone who can should exit the state ASAP. It is not likely to get any better anytime soon.
Sad. It was once such a lovely state where fortunes could be made and life was good.
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Halfway through our pleasant, calm, 3-week-long spell of lovely, warm, late-Spring weather – otherwise known as HEAT, DROUGHT, RECORD-BREAKING EARLY SUMMER IT-MIGHT-GET-WORSE PANIC to the media, even though it was snowing & freezing in Tasmania but a few days ago – RadioNZ (read: ABC) used a classic, back-lit, water vapour file photo at sunset to ‘ram home’ the need for “action”.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/business/345006/time-for-action-on-climate-change-business-group
“Climate change is a global issue already affecting business in New Zealand directly through increasingly extreme weather events, and indirectly through divestment away from fossil fuels,” she said.
Calm, pleasant, warm, high pressure is now “extreme”? And as for windmills and solar farms, one day in the future, archaeologists will dig down through the snow and ice to find broken, shattered stumps of said technology and exclaim: “Hmmm, fossil fuel… dead.”
And don’t mention the volcanoes… [I live on the tuff ring of one, drive past two and ferry past another on the way to work each day] 😉
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Iceland has alot of volcanic activity. It is the surface expression of the mid-Atlantic Rift, that continues south for some 5,000 miles. Perhaps most of it with similar geology.
Lots of venting gases.
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Good point, Bob.
Those of us in the Southern Hemisphere, are a parochial lot, and tend to look at what is happening, South of the Equator. We should know better.
My partner studied the geophysics of Iceland, as part of her Degree, so I should have known better. Thank you for the reminder.
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I don’t know that it has been done, but it would be interesting to estimate how much CO2 Iceland’s volcanic activity emits. Then extrapolate it to the Atlantic Rift.
Matbe Ian Plimer has done this?
01
Joanne, thanks as always for an interesting article. However, I fear there is some confusion. A seamount is NOT an active volcano, as many seem to think. Most of them are the remains of EXTINCT volcanoes. There is a whole string of them to the west of the Hawaiian Islands, for example. At one time when the hot spot was under them and modern Hawaii didn’t exist, they were active and stuck out above the surface of the ocean.
But then the hot spot moved, the volcano went extinct, a new volcano was born to the east, and the extinct volcano was worn down to where it is now below the surface … presto, a seamount. That’s why, unlike active volcanoes, seamounts generally have flat tops—erosian and waves cut the tops flat once the were no longer active.
As a result, in the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, there are a total of 50 volcanic islands and seamounts … of which two are active. And yes, more scanning might find more of them … but they’ll be extinct too, the hot spot has moved on …
So in answer to your question, do 40,000 volcanoes matter, the clear answer is … no, because the overwhelming majority of them are extinct.
Best regards to all,
w.
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Willis
The Hawaiian Islands, where ever they may be, are “shield” volcanoes. And as you point out they build over “hot spots” and then move on to eternal erosion.
As noted in my post above, the type that has my interest are the active ones that are at the surface at Iceland. And by implication all the similar vents along the mid-Atlantic rift for some 5,000 miles to the south.
Bob
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