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An Underwater Eruption

January 30, 2018

The remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Jason lands on the seafloor to retrieve a heat flow monitor during a 2015 expedition to explore an eruption at the Havre volcano off the coast of New Zealand. An international team of researchers recently published a paper describing the first up-close investigation of the largest underwater volcanic eruption of the past century. More than 70 percent of all volcanic activity on Earth occurs on the seafloor, but details of these events are largely hidden by seawater. Researchers were alerted to the Havre eruption after a passenger on a flight over the Southwest Pacific Ocean noticed a large raft of floating rock (pumice). (Image courtesy of Multidisciplinary Instrumentation in Support of Oceanography (MISO) Facility, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)