HR: 0800h
AN: ED51A-0010    [Abstracts]
TI: Who cares about Mid-Ocean Ridge Earthquakes? And Why?
AU: * Tolstoy, M
EM: tolstoy@ldeo.columbia.edu
AF: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, NY 10964-8000 United States
AB: Every day the surface of our planet is being slowly ripped apart by the forces of plate tectonics. Much of this activity occurs underwater and goes unnoticed except for by a few marine seismologists who avidly follow the creaks and groans of the ocean floor in an attempt to understand the spreading and formation of oceanic crust. Are marine seismologists really the only ones that care? As it turns out, deep beneath the ocean surface, earthquakes play a fundamental role in a myriad of activity centered on mid-ocean ridges where new crust forms and breaks on a regular basis. This activity takes the form of exotic geological structures hosting roasting hot fluids and bizarre chemosynthetic life forms. One of the fundamental drivers for this other world on the seafloor is earthquakes. Earthquakes provide cracks that allow seawater to penetrate the rocks, heat up, and resurface as hydrothermal vent fluids, thus providing chemicals to feed a thriving biological community. Earthquakes can cause pressure changes along cracks that can fundamentally alter fluid flow rates and paths. Thus earthquakes can both cut off existing communities from their nutrient source and provide new oases on the seafloor around which life can thrive. This poster will present some of the fundamental physical principals of how earthquakes can impact fluid flow, and hence life on the seafloor. Using these other-wordly landscapes and alien-like life forms to woe the unsuspecting passerby, we will sneak geophysics into the picture and tell the story of why earthquakes are so fundamental to life on the seafloor, and perhaps life elsewhere in the universe.
DE: 6605 Education
DE: 3035 Midocean ridge processes
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting