MP3 Alert: Seafloor Rumbles at Volcanic Vents

Smoking seafloor vents enliven the depths with audible rumblings, according to an amusing press release from the University of Washington. The din comes as news to the scientific community, which has always assumed that the corrosive burps from undersea volcanoes are essentially silent.

The UW team, led by an enterprising grad student named Timothy Crone, settled the matter by driving a remote-controlled sub more than a mile down into the Pacific Ocean and placing a hardy recording device in a stream of caustic, 750 degree-C vent water. The answer: Hell yes it made some noise, and you can hear mp3s of it on Crone’s site. The sound is reminiscent of a breeze sweeping past a microphone, coupled with a stomach gently digesting a chili dog.

The acoustic team even extracted some resonant tones coming from two of the vents – most likely generated when sounds reverberated within pockets and crannies inside the vent. Isolated from the background noise, they’re not exactly lute-like. They’re rather more like hearing several varieties of horsefly of increasing bloodthirstiness circling your head.

Crone gets my respect for studying this new angle on vents, for picking the open-access journal PLoS ONE to publish in, and for posting graphs, data, audio, and video on his own website. UW gets points for collecting all those resources in one multimedia press release. They get mixed reviews for the press release itself.

I appreciate the efforts of science writers everywhere to make dry science into something not just digestible but actually juicy. Enticing. In so doing, we all cultivate our own relationship with the facts of the matter, and presumably cleave pretty close to them. So for a paper that is about measuring sound energy, I have to question the headline “‘Good vibrations’ from deep-sea smokers may keep fish out of hot water.”

The paper itself only sidles to the edge of biology, with sentences like this:

…fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods, which are common in these environments [33], [34] and can typically detect and process sound [35]–[38], might utilize this source of environmental information to their advantage.

So, much as I enjoy the quirky first-fish narration that opens the press release:

So you’re a fish. Right now some tubeworm tartare and clams on the half shell would really hit the spot, so you’re headed for the all-night cafe. “All-night” being the operative word because the volcanic ridge you’re tooling along is nearly 1.5 miles below the surface. The term “where the sun don’t shine” perfectly describes the place. It’s always pitch black. Darn, but what’s that loud rumbling up ahead? Must be one of those pesky black smokers. Some of those babies can fry your face off. A detour is highly indicated.

I have to wonder if that’s stretching things perhaps a little too far.

(Thanks, Hannah. Image: Oceanus primer on black smoker vents)