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Marine geophysics

Where there's smoke there's fire

Nature Geoscience volume 2, pages 463–464 (2009)Cite this article

Seafloor vents spewing mineral-rich plumes of hydrothermal fluid — termed black smokers — can persist at mid-ocean ridges for decades or longer. Earthquake data indicate that ongoing magma injection may determine their locations.

Black-smoker hydrothermal venting, which occurs along mid-ocean ridges in the world's oceans, results in significant heat and chemical exchange between Earth's crust and the overlying water. Black-smoker vents provide nutrients for extraordinary chemosynthetic biological communities, expanding our knowledge about how life may exist on Earth and elsewhere. Black smokers are generally associated with loss of heat from a magma body within the oceanic crust: as sea water percolating through the crust approaches the magma, it is heated and laden with minerals, and subsequently returns to the sea floor. Venting sites are common along the global chain of seafloor volcanoes, but the factors influencing their location remain elusive. On page 509 of this issue, Wilcock and colleagues1 suggest that black smokers may occur at sites where the magma chamber is being actively recharged.

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Figure 1: Spewing smoke.

DEBORAH KELLEY / JOHN DELANEY

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  1. Maya Tolstoy is at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, New York 10964–8000, USA. tolstoy@ldeo.columbia.edu,

    Maya Tolstoy

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Tolstoy, M. Where there's smoke there's fire. Nature Geosci 2, 463–464 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo564

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