North experts to explore earth’s deep-sea secrets (From The Northern Echo)

North experts to explore earth’s deep-sea secrets

8:23am Thursday 15th May 2008 in

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EXPERTS from the North-East will lead an international scientific team that will explore the deep-sea secrets of the Earth's crust.

The team from Durham University will take part in a five-week expedition in the Atlantic on Britain's Royal Research Ship (RRS) James Cook, which sails from the Azores on Friday, May 23.

They will use explorer robots to map individual volcanoes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge tectonic plate boundary, which runs down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean, nearly two miles below the sea surface.

Another robot, called Isis, will collect rock samples that will be dated to shed more light on the timescale of the growth of the earth's crust and the related tectonic plates.

As tectonic plates are pulled apart by forces in the earth, rocks deep down in the mantle are pulled up to fill the gap.

As the rocks rise they start to melt and form thousands of volcanoes on the sea floor that eventually cluster into giant ridges.

The ridges along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge plate boundary are each about the size of the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and contain hundreds of individual volcanoes.

Principal investigator Professor Roger Searle, of Durham University's department of earth sciences, said: "The problem is that we don't know how fast these volcanoes form or if they all come from melting the same piece of mantle rock.

"The ridges may form quickly, perhaps in 10,000 years (about the time since the end of the last Ice Age) with hundreds of thousands of years' inactivity before the next one forms, or they may take half-a-million years to form, the most recent having begun before the rise of modern humans.

"Understanding the processes forming the crust is important, because the whole ocean floor, some 60 per cent of the earth's surface, has been recycled and reformed many times over the planet's history."

Prof Searle's team will include scientists from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, the Open University, the University of Paris and several institutions in the US.

Co-investigators on the project are Durham Professors Jon Davidson and Yaoling Niu and Dr Bramley Murton, of the National Oceanography Centre.

The work is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, which owns and operates the RRS James Cook.