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The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the "fountains" of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole.
"Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process,"according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice.
They returned with images and data showing that red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth and blown the tops off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometres below the ice.
"Jets or fountains of material were probably blasted one, maybe even two, kilometres up into the water,"says geophysicist Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who led the expedition.
"The scale and magnitude of the explosive activity that we're seeing here dwarfs anything we've seen on other mid-ocean ridges,"says Sohn, who studies ridges around the world. The volume of gas and lava that appears to have blasted out of the Gakkel volcanoes is "much, much higher" than that seen at other ridges.
The scientists say they have explored just one small stretch of the Gakkel Ridge and hope to return in a few years.
[widespread, ongoing process of dozens of submarine volcanoes discharging magma on a scale that dwarfs anything else they've seen, under the ice near the North Pole - and that from the one small stretch they visited. -- So when the Arctic enters its next melt cycle, remember: it's because of your light bulbs.]
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