Why do underwater volcanoes erupt

Scientists are closer to understanding the formation of underwater megaplumes, large and powerful columns of heated water rising from the ocean floor.

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A three-day ship journey off the Mexican coast brought Maya Tolstoy to a part of an ocean known only by its map coordinates. Below was the East Pacific Rise, a point in the ocean floor where continents move apart, causing magma contained in the Earth's core to rise to the surface and spew from underwater volcanoes.

Into these depths, Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, dropped 12 seismographs. They would help her track volcanism at the seabed. Her quest was driven by an attempt to measure the contribution such underwater volcanoes make to the global climate over thousands of years. They spew lava, carbon dioxide and other elements into the deep oceans. The carbon gets trapped in circulating water, cycled to different regions of the ocean, where it gets caught up in upwelling currents and emitted to the atmosphere.

The process can take up to 2, years and adds a fraction of the 88 million metric tons of carbon belched out by the volcanoes to the atmosphere. Tolstoy wanted to figure out how often these volcanoes erupt and what causes their eruption. Her ocean voyage happened in , and five years later, her research was published this week in Geophysical Research Letters. In it, she finds that the Earth's volcanism is tied to minute shifts in motion of the Earth around the sun, as well as to sea levels, in a chain of events that scientists have never before envisioned.

This pillow lava, along with slower-cooling magma beneath it, forms the vast majority of oceanic crust. Frequent eruptions along divergent plate boundaries such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge form new ocean bottom in a process known as seafloor spreading. August 31, August 17, Subscribe Sign up for our newsletter! Calendar Twitter Facebook.