Scientists have discovered a strange leak in the Ocean floor off the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada, which could eventually be responsible for an earthquake of huge magnitude.
You can see what’s happening at the bottom of the sea below:
This specific feature, which one scientist believes has never been observed before, has been called Pythia’s Oasis, and it’s part of the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ), which is a large fault line that stretches from Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast right down to Northern California.
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Now, while they were observing methane bubbles coming from a mile beneath the ocean, researchers from the University of Washington discovered that liquid considerably warmer than the ocean water around it was seeping out of the ocean floor some 50 miles offshore from Newport, Oregon.
They believe that the water leaking out might be connected to the CSZ, and could be vital to preventing earthquakes.
You see, the subduction zone is where two plates are meeting with one another, but this fluid may well be acting as a pressure regulator down between the continental plate and the ocean plate that are bashing up against each other some two miles beneath the ocean.
The water temperature down at the fault is about 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, which would explain why this water spewing out ‘like a firehose’ is warmer.
Anyway, if more water is leaking out, this could be causing an increase in pressure at the fault, which can cause stress between the two plates.
If that stress builds up and the plates slip, there may be an earthquake.
Evan Solomon, a University of Washington Oceanographer and the co-author of a paper about this phenomenon in journal Scientific Advances, said: “The megathrust fault zone is like an air hockey table.
“If the fluid pressure is high, it’s like the air is turned on, meaning there’s less friction and the two plates can slip.
“If the fluid pressure is lower, the two plates will lock.
“That’s when stress can build up.
“Fluid released from the fault zone is like leaking lubricant. That’s bad news for earthquake hazards: Less lubricant means stress can build to create a damaging quake.”
In their paper, the authors said that they aren’t sure if Pythia’s Oasis is the ‘only seep of its kind’ but posit that there could be others around the CSZ.
That’s interesting news to the seismologists.
Co-author and professor of oceanography Deborah Kelley said: "Pythias Oasis provides a rare window into processes acting deep in the seafloor, and its chemistry suggests this fluid comes from near the plate boundary.
"This suggests that the nearby faults regulate fluid pressure and megathrust slip behavior along the central Cascadia Subduction Zone."
Explaining how they discovered the underground water, Solomon added: “They explored in that direction, and what they saw was not just methane bubbles, but water coming out of the seafloor like a firehose.
“That’s something I’ve never seen and, to my knowledge, has not been observed before.”
As is often the case with science, it’s one thing to observe these things, but entirely another to predict what will happen next.
In this case, it could be a large earthquake off the coast of North America.
Even in a place that is no stranger to such activity, this could be a big one.
Tom Wood