Right now were diving in the crater of Vailulu'u Volcano and we're on a structure in the middle
of the crater that has appeared in the last eighteen years.
This structure wasn't here, it's a cone that's more than a thousand feet tall above the crater
floor.
The hotspots volcanoes are a plume of hot rock basically in the material of the earth
rising up all the way to the oceanic crust that are far from the boundaries of the tectonic
plates.
And as tectonic plates move over these plume you will serve a formation of chains of volcanoes
all in a line and Samoa is an example of this process.
The first stage in ocean exploration is to make a map and for many areas of the world
that we work, there simply are no high resolution maps.
So very often the mapping team will go first to an area generate high quality, high resolution
maps of the seafloor.
And from there we pick our ROV dive targets.
One of the reasons that we are interested in diving this place is that we have detected
a growth of the central cone which may be cause by recent eruptions in the last few
years.
So this is an active volcano and is a dynamic system and we see continuous changes.
When we went over the top of Vailulu'u over last week and a half and mapped it again,
it became very clear that the cone approximately doubled in volume since two thousand five.
During the dive we were able to move from the older portion of the column to the two
new columns and it was really clear that the two new columns looked younger.
And in terms of just being fresher that hadn't been exposed to the sea water as long.
They also look younger because they didn't have as well developed biological communities.
So its really interesting that for an experiment those early colonizers of course there are
some species that come late and this is process that we know that is happening in ecosystems
on land that is much better understood.
But this process of succession and recolonization of areas is poorly understood in deep sea
environments after an eruption.
I think the most exciting event as a geologist the most exciting aspect of all this is to
really see to be witness to how biology takes a foothold on new seafloor.
The newest seafloor thats formed.
Currently Vailulu'u's crater is about half a mile deep.
So the question is when is Vailulu'u going to make it to the surface?
That's a really tough question.
Volcanoes are difficult to predict.
If the volcano continues to show its present rate of growth.
It could potentially summit on the order of thousands of years.