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Ocean floor is a new, changing frontier

Maya Tolstoy set a high bar for herself early in her talk: Making her audience care about the bottom of the ocean.

That comes easier for her than most.

The marine geophysicist and seismologist first became fascinated with the power of earthquakes and “how tiny they make us realize we are” as an undergraduate.

Then, one summer, she went on a research trip in the ocean and “completely fell in love” with the sea. Her academic pursuits have managed to combine the two.

Tolstoy, the second speaker Tuesday at Gustavus Adolphus College’s Nobel Conference, spoke mostly about two very different types of undersea quakes.

Tiny ones

Along the center ridge of the Atlantic Ocean, the longest mountain range on Earth, there are undersea vents. These vents, which spew nutrient-filled hot water, are packed with bacteria, shrimp, crabs and tubeworms.

“It’s absolutely packed with life,” Tolstoy said.

But the oases have a geological underpinning. Rocks, Tolstoy said, are beneath it all.

Tiny earthquakes create holes in the rock, allowing ocean water to seep in. About 1 percent or 2 percent of the ocean is in the Earth’s crust.

The water leeches nutrients from the rocks, and recycles them back through the vents.

These vents are located near volcanoes, and an eruption clears out the ecosystem. But within a few years, it looks like nothing happened.

And lest this seem a bit arcane, Tolstoy said it has real-world applications.

A colleague of hers used calculations about how much liquid comes from undersea vents to make the first predictions in a peer-reviewed journal about how much gas was coming from the 2010 BP oil spill.

“Basic research always has significant, unintended applications,” she said.

Tolstoy submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to investigate whether life forms at the vents were timing their reproduction with the mini-earthquakes.

She said another application to her work is the search for life in other planets. Searching for seismic activity would be her recommendation for places to find life, probably microbial life, on Mars. She said a project to put a seismometer on Mars has been funded.

Big ones

On March 11, 2011, the seafloor near Japan jumped about 60 feet in a matter of seconds. The massive quake lifted a wall of water that killed 20,896 people.

A Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami killed 227,898 people in southeast Asia.

Unlike the mini-quakes, tsunami-triggering earthquakes happen when one plate slides beneath, or is “subducted,” under another plate, and pushes it up.

She said the plates off the Oregon and Washington coasts will eventually trigger a large quake.

“It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’” she said.

But she said she’s optimistic about new evidence that may allow scientists to forecast large quakes.

Just as the moon pulls water with ocean tides, it also pulls the Earth itself, though to a much smaller degree. The effect of that tidal force on earthquakes has been long debated.

But it turns out that the strength of that relationship (for small quakes) rose in the decade or so preceding the massive earthquakes off Sumatra and Japan.

Tolstoy isn’t saying the moon causes tsunamis, but this correlation could give clues when a Big One is coming.

Related Photos

  • David Gallo, an oceanographer, spoke about exploration during his talk at the Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter. The conference continues Wednesday.

    nobel 2.jpg

  • The 48th Nobel Conference opened Tuesday at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter. Executive Director Lars Heikensten addressed the crowd summarizing the history of the nobel prize.

    nobel 1.jpg

October 2, 2012

Nobel speaker in deep

Oceanographer describes exploration of wrecks

By Dan Linehan Free Press Staff Writer

ST PETER — David Gallo, who grew up in central New York, said his attention-deficit disorder gave him trouble in school.

So when a teacher told Gallo he didn’t have the aptitude for science, it stuck with him. Gallo did end up in science, though he took a non-traditional path.

In 1976, he was in his mid-20s working in a shoe store when he read a National Geographic article by ocean explorer Bob Ballard. The story of discovery reignited a sense of wonder he had first experienced as a child.

By 1987, he had his Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island. Not that it was easy. He said it took “focus, persistence, and you have to work your tail off.”

The transition from selling shoes to ocean-diving, at least, gave him a decent pun: After the first 1,000 feet, both get a lot easier, he said.

He is now the director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

Gallo was the first speaker Tuesday at Gustavus Adolphus College’s 48th annual Nobel Conference in St. Peter, attended by between 4,000 and 5,000 people.

Explorer

Gallo may be most well known for co-leading an exploration of the Titanic. Mapping the two chunks of the ship was an exercise in patience, given the total lack of light.

“It’s akin to going to the Rocky Mountains to find two boxes of shoes with a flashlight.”

His last thought before descending for a 2 1/2-hour stint in the submarine?

“Should I have gone to the bathroom again?”

Curiosity

Curiosity remains a “driving force” in his science, he said, sometimes to the detriment of his current research.

“I get excited and interested in a lot of things. This morning it was tomatoes,” he said.

At other times, it’s history.

The ocean, he said, contains “big lumps of human history,” from the Titanic to Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009.

On the Titanic, he said, there was no communications equipment, so a captain’s order that women and children get the first lifeboat seats was misunderstood as only women and children get lifeboat seats. The richest man on the ship died, he said, after he wasn’t allowed to accompany his wife onto a lifeboat with empty seats.

The ocean also has been a fertile ground for curiosity, given that perhaps 5 percent or 10 percent has been explored, depending on how you define the term.

Gallo was on the team that recovered the flight recorders from the Flight 447 wreckage, which was located using two torpedo-shaped robots.

Piloting the autonomous vehicles doesn’t require much expertise.

“Any kid who can play a video game can drive one of these robots,” Gallo said.

Finding the plane was an emotional moment, given the urge to celebrate the accomplishment.

“At the same time, it’s not a thing to celebrate,” he said. The crash killed each of the 228 passengers.

Emotions are a natural part of science, he said. “We try to make believe science is this non-emotional thing.”

New perspectives

Gallo ended his talk with a quote from the French writer Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

That can be taken almost literally, given the new equipment being designed by the engineers at Woods Hole, whom Gallo calls the “true heroes” of ocean exploration.

It may also mean thinking differently about what is already visible.

He said people used to think the ocean was too vast to be changeable by people.

“We are changing the chemistry of the ocean.”

And, though he didn’t mention it by name, he suggested it’s time to start seeing climate change differently, given we now know people can change the ocean.

“I don’t know how much more we need to know (before taking action)  ...” he said.

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