Full on eruption, baby! Yeah!
So, the CTD came up and we sampled several of the bottles and we knew that it was likely to be enriched in hydrogen,
so I ran those samples first and we saw a very significant concentration of hydrogen in the plume.
We started to see lots of indicators, lots of layers of plumes.
And Ben just came back and said he’s seen so much hydrogen that he’s had to dilute his samples a lot.
It’s 750 nanomolar. Background is like one nanomolar, so there’s a lot of hydrogen there.
So basically the idea behind the sampling is to make sure there’s no air, no atmosphere, in the water sample.
All your gas is dissolved in the water sample.
In order to get it out of there and put it in a form that we can analyze, you have to put a headspace on it and we use helium to do that.
And you kind of shake up the water with this helium and it kind of pulls out all of the gas and
then you inject that gas into the GC and then you can measure what’s in the gas.
And then you can back calculate how much was in the water to begin with.
When you have an eruption, you get a lot of violent interaction between hot rock and seawater and it creates lots of particles.
Basically, we loaded particles onto these filters and I’ll take them back to the lab and I’ll get the elemental composition of the particles.
You see how this one, kind of like, when I did the rinse. Yeah. It move the stuff around a little?
It moves some stuff around, which usually means sulfur.
If it comes right out of the vents and it’s super yellow, then it’s obvious.
But once you get up in the water column, it’s probably got iron and sulfur both in it.
Oh, absolutely.
With Ahyi having erupted and NW Rota having stopped, you start to ask yourself the question, how frequently do these things do this?
So it’s really pretty cool that we found another erupting volcano.
I mean, I came out here to study the erupting volcano at NW Rota. Shut out. I didn’t get my work done.
And then, here’s another opportunity.