On Thursday I wrote about
"The Blob" of warm water
in the Pacific Ocean,
and other strange weather
I also mentioned the
"Holes on the ocean floor".
I just found out the subject
was discussed earlier
in December at the
the annual meeting of the
American Geophysical Union.
Researchers discovered
many depressions
on the ocean floor
in the late 1990s
while investigating
a really large depression.
Scientists using
ship-mounted
sonar found
enormous craters
—more than
100 meters across
and 5 meters deep,
on the bottom
on the bottom
of the Pacific Ocean.
The leading theory is
“gas is bubbling up
to the sea floor and
lifting sediment and
leaving a depression,”
says Eve Lundsten,
a research technician
at the Monterey Bay
Aquarium Research
Institute in Moss Landing,
California.
Sonar images
below revealed
below revealed
an enormous crater
at the bottom of
the Pacific Ocean.
Lundsten, and her Monterey
Bay Aquarium collaborators,
launched underwater vehicles
in 2018 and 2019 to scan the
ocean bottom about 30 km.
off the coast of Big Sur,
a town south of Monterey.
Just off the coast of California,
thousands of crater-like
depressions, some as big
as buses, dot the sea floor.
Roughly 15,000 craters,
never before seen,
dot the ocean floor
near Big Sur, the
Monterey team
reported at the
annual meeting
of the American
Geophysical Union.
These so-called
“micro-depressions”
are typically
10 meters across,
and 1 meter deep.
About one-third
of them
of them
contain trash.
Shown below:
Trash and marine life
Trash and marine life
fill one "micro-depression"
off the coast of Big Sur:
The trash
attracts marine life,
attracts marine life,
and the swimming and
burrowing creatures,
such as fish, snails,
sea anemones,
and starfish,
were in many
of the trash-laden
micro-depressions.
Lundsten and
her colleagues
also found rocks
and animal bones
in some of the
micro-depressions.
The trash is
creating habitats
for marine life,
the team concluded.
And maybe the
marine life is
somehow creating
the depressions ?
But ... some of the
micro-depressions
didn’t contain
anything at all.
It’s still a mystery
how these empty
micro-depressions
had developed.
Under the
ocean floor,
gas venting
of some sort
is a leading theory
for the "craters",
but so far they
found no evidence
of gas venting !
As usual, real science
has many unanswered
questions.
Only junk science
"knows all".
I learned a little more than
reported a few days ago,
but I'm still surprised
that no one blamed this
on "climate change".