This week's Sea-Floor Sunday is a quick one.
A paper came out in Marine Geology last month (v. 250, p. 258-275) about a methane-seeping, actively-growing sea-floor mound in Santa Monica Basin (offshore Los Angeles, CA).
It's like a zit on the sea floor!!
In the perspective bathymetric image below, note the depth scale (colors) and the distance scale (in red by bottom of image). This is a big zit!
What's more is that the mound hosts a biologic community ... a chemosynthetic community of organisms. In addition to the mapping and profiling of the feature, they also took some photographs and did some sampling of the mound. Very cool stuff.
The first author is a marine geologist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) ... they have a fantastic website about all the geologic and biologic research they do in the deep sea and submarine canyons. Check it out here.
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