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Gary Robbins -
>Mount Whitney rises 14,494 feet high in California’s majestic Sierra Nevada, making it the highest summit in the lower 48 states. It also means Whitney is shorter than some of the undersea mountains — or seamounts — that are now being charted by the Melville, a research vessel out of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
SIO officials say scientists aboard the Melville are finding seamounts as tall as 14,700 feet on a mapping mission underway in the South Atlantic. One of the seamounts has a diameter of 87 miles, roughly the distance between San Diego and Long Beach.
“Only about seven percent of the seafloor has been mapped by ship, so there are a lot of uncharted seamounts around the world,” said David Sandwell, an SIO geophysicist who is helping guide scientists aboard the Melville from his office in La Jolla.
“It’s important to study them. We need to understand the geology of the ocean floor.”
Sandwell says some of the seamounts are inactive volcanoes that can affect the path of ocean currents which, in turn, can affect weather and climate. The seamounts also are gathering spots for a diverse collection of marine species, including some types of commercially harvested fish.
Locating and charting the seamounts is tricky business. Scientists use satellite radar to study the ocean’s surface. Those images reveal the rough location of subsea volcanoes and seamounts. But then scientists have to go to sea and use sophisticated sonar to map the upper reaches of the mountains -- which is what researchers on Melville have been doing as they’ve explored a region 1,200 miles southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.
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