Scientists find 50 million years old volcanoes underwater off the Sydney coast

A team of scientists has discovered four volcanoes underwater off the coast of Sydney while they were on an Australian research vessel for another mission. The vessel was about 250 kilometers away from the coast when the team discovered a cluster of volcanoes. The scientists were using a technique called sonar mapping for their other mission when they accidently stumbled upon these 50 million years old volcanoes which surprised everybody. There were four volcanoes discovered that looked like bowl-shaped craters. The largest of these volcanoes is 1.5 kilometers across the rim and 700 meters in latitude. The cluster of these volcanoes runs for about 20 kilometers and approximately 5 kilometers underwater. The scientists put forward the theory that the volcanoes were shaped that way by a series of shifts in geological plates that triggered the separation of New Zealand and Australia. Iain Suthers, the lead investigator and a marine biologist at the University of New South Wales said that he instantly wondered what these structures were doing underwater and what they were doing here lying undiscovered. He believes that the discovery may attest to the idea that far more information about Mars has been discovered compared to the data gathered about the Earth’s sea floor.

Professor Richard Arculus, a volcano expert at the Australian National University said,” They tell us a part of the story of how New Zealand and Australia separated around 40 to 80 million years ago, and they’ll now help scientists’ target future exploration of the sea floor to unlock the secrets of the earth’s crust.” A volcano, as everyone knows, is a rupture on the crust of a planetary-mass object like Earth that allows hot lava, volcanic ash and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. The volcanoes can be classified into active or dormant depending on their activity.

The RV Investigator, the vessel that led the researchers to the discovery is managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research organization (CSIRO) has helped the others too to discover things they’ve never seen in the past. The vessel measure 94 meters and was commissioned by the CSIRO in 2009 through the funding support of the Federal government which racks up to $120 million. Initially the vessel was commissioned to look for Small Ocean eddies in Australia’s east coast. Later in March this year, it underwent testing and is said to have acquired the ability to create a sea floor map at any depth. Using that, the scientist found out the volcanoes and hope that it could explain the process of separation of New Zealand and Australia.