lofter1
September 4th, 2006, 01:03 PM
Scientists Map 'New Frontier' Deep Within Ocean
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/images/sht2_thumb_300.jpg
aol_news (http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/scientists-map-new-frontier-deep-within/20060903102009990001?cid=2194)
By JEFFREY GOLD, AP
September 4, 2006
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (Sept. 4) - Although just 100 miles off the New Jersey-New York coast, the features of the Hudson Canyon are have been largely hidden beneath hundreds of feet of water.
Created by the Hudson River centuries ago, parts of the massive, undersea region rival the Grand Canyon in scale. Now, for the first time, scientists have a vivid picture of what the mysterious region looks like.
A four-year study using high-tech tools has produced maps of an undersea region the size of Connecticut. Scientists said the maps will allow them to study many things, including whether methane gas trapped in frozen sediment below the sea floor is escaping and exacerbating global warming.
Also of interest is whether gas releases could spark undersea landslides that produce tsunamis. In addition to producing giant waves, landslides could cleave the undersea phone cables that handle much of the nation's overseas communications, said Peter A. Rona, a Rutgers University professor who led the team that produced the maps.
It is also possible that the methane could be harvested as an energy source, although no technology yet exists to extract the gas, which is dispersed under the ocean floor over millions of square miles in this and other areas of the world, Rona said.
"These are the aspects that are completely unexplored," Rona said as he examined the 3 1/2-by-5-foot maps at the Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences at Rutgers' Cook College campus. "This region, the Hudson Canyon, is on the doorstep of one of the largest metropolitan areas of the world, and it is an exploration frontier."
http://cdn.news.aol.com/aolnews_photos/03/00/20060903173509990001
Mel Evans, AP
"The Hudson Canyon is on the doorstep
of one of the largest metropolitan areas
of the world," Professor Peter Rona said.
"It is an exploration frontier."
The maps became available this summer, free from the U.S. Geological Survey at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/index.html, and researchers not involved in the project gave the results good reviews.
The map "adds significant new detail to the Hudson Canyon subsea landscape," said William Ryan, a senior scholar at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "The map reveals for the first time all of the tributaries of an extraordinary underwater drainage network that is strikingly similar to terrestrial rivers."
Indeed, the undersea canyon acts at times like a river, Ryan said, noting, "Tidal currents sweep up and down the channel. On occasion during big storms cold ocean water is pushed up the Hudson Canyon to spread out on the shelf."
Another marine geologist at Lamont-Doherty, Cecilia M. McHugh, said, the new maps are great work that will allow scientists to track contaminants from six abandoned dump sites off New York Harbor.
The response is gratifying to professor Rona, who spent three weeks in 2002 on a research vessel traversing the region to gather the data. Starting 200 miles out at sea, the Ronald L. Brown would travel on a 60-mile line roughly parallel to the coast as a multi-beamed sonar system attached to the keel bounced sound waves off the ocean floor more than a mile below.
The shape and depth of the sea floor was determined by how long it takes for the sound to return to the ship and the speed of sound through the water.
After completing each line, the vessel would then move closer to the coast to scan a new 60-mile long swath. It repeated this process about 50 times, covering a rectangle 100 miles long and 60 miles wide - 6,000 square miles.
The vessel, provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, readily weathered a hurricane and 25-foot waves.
"You can't do much. You hang on," said Rona, whose career has carried him across the seven seas, including time in tiny submarines 3 1/2 miles under the ocean surface.
Over the next four years, Rona and his team "cleaned" the data, removing extraneous matter caused by waves and other noises.
"It was all done for less than $1 million. It was very cost-effective," Rona said.
The team included researchers from Rutgers, the U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and Stony Brook University in New York.
Rona said the map is the most comprehensive ever done of the region, yet it only illuminated formations larger than a football field.
He is seeking funding to get greater detail by sending unmanned submarines to locations of special interest. These diving robots can take photos, sediment samples and measure ocean chemistry.
Rona said he suspects that such data could give clues on whether collapsed pits seen on the ocean floor resulted from old or recent landslides, and whether methane is being emitted.
The area's centerpiece is the giant underwater chasm called the Hudson Canyon. "It's the largest submarine canyon off the East Coast of the United States, and one of the largest submarine canyons in the world," Rona said.
From its shallow beginning at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, the Hudson Shelf Valley becomes the Hudson Canyon, which extends some 450 miles out from shore. In places its walls rise three-quarters of a mile from the canyon floor.
That makes it comparable to the Grand Canyon, whose rims are over a mile above the Colorado River, which winds through the gorge for over 270 miles.
Much of the Hudson Canyon was formed during the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, when the sea level was about 400 feet lower and the mouth of the Hudson River was near the edge of the continental shelf, about 100 miles east of its present site. The river discharged sediment that helped carve the canyon, aided by underwater avalanches of mud and sand, scientists said.
© 2006 America Online, Inc.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press
***
Sea Floor Topography and Backscatter Intensity of the Hudson Canyon Region Offshore of New York and New Jersey
By Bradford Butman1, David C. Twichell1, Peter A. Rona2, Brian E. Tucholke3, Tammie J. Middleton4, and James M. Robb1
usgs.gov (http://usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/index.html)
2006
Introduction (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/html/intro.html)
These maps show the sea floor topography and backscatter intensity of the Hudson Canyon region on the continental slope and rise offshore of New Jersey and New York. Sheet 1 (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/images/pdf/sht1_shaded.pdf) shows sea floor topography as shaded relief. Sheet 2 (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/images/pdf/sht2_back.pdf) shows sea floor topography as shaded relief with backscatter intensity superimposed in color. Both sheets are at a scale of 1:300,000 and also show smoothed topographic contours at selected intervals. The maps are based on new multibeam echo-sounder data collected on an 18-day cruise carried out aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ship Ronald H. Brown during August and September 2002. Additional multibeam data of the Hudson Canyon collected by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), on the continental shelf collected by the STRATAFORM project (Goff and others, 1999), and a survey of the Hudson Shelf Valley (Butman and others, 2003), and a compilation of bathymetric data from the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) Coastal Relief Model provide coverage of areas surrounding Hudson Canyon. Interpretations of the surficial geology also utilize widely spaced 3.5- and 10-kiloHertz (kHz) high-resolution seismic profiles collected by the U.S. Geological Survey.
***
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/images/sht2_thumb_300.jpg
aol_news (http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/scientists-map-new-frontier-deep-within/20060903102009990001?cid=2194)
By JEFFREY GOLD, AP
September 4, 2006
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (Sept. 4) - Although just 100 miles off the New Jersey-New York coast, the features of the Hudson Canyon are have been largely hidden beneath hundreds of feet of water.
Created by the Hudson River centuries ago, parts of the massive, undersea region rival the Grand Canyon in scale. Now, for the first time, scientists have a vivid picture of what the mysterious region looks like.
A four-year study using high-tech tools has produced maps of an undersea region the size of Connecticut. Scientists said the maps will allow them to study many things, including whether methane gas trapped in frozen sediment below the sea floor is escaping and exacerbating global warming.
Also of interest is whether gas releases could spark undersea landslides that produce tsunamis. In addition to producing giant waves, landslides could cleave the undersea phone cables that handle much of the nation's overseas communications, said Peter A. Rona, a Rutgers University professor who led the team that produced the maps.
It is also possible that the methane could be harvested as an energy source, although no technology yet exists to extract the gas, which is dispersed under the ocean floor over millions of square miles in this and other areas of the world, Rona said.
"These are the aspects that are completely unexplored," Rona said as he examined the 3 1/2-by-5-foot maps at the Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences at Rutgers' Cook College campus. "This region, the Hudson Canyon, is on the doorstep of one of the largest metropolitan areas of the world, and it is an exploration frontier."
http://cdn.news.aol.com/aolnews_photos/03/00/20060903173509990001
Mel Evans, AP
"The Hudson Canyon is on the doorstep
of one of the largest metropolitan areas
of the world," Professor Peter Rona said.
"It is an exploration frontier."
The maps became available this summer, free from the U.S. Geological Survey at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/index.html, and researchers not involved in the project gave the results good reviews.
The map "adds significant new detail to the Hudson Canyon subsea landscape," said William Ryan, a senior scholar at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "The map reveals for the first time all of the tributaries of an extraordinary underwater drainage network that is strikingly similar to terrestrial rivers."
Indeed, the undersea canyon acts at times like a river, Ryan said, noting, "Tidal currents sweep up and down the channel. On occasion during big storms cold ocean water is pushed up the Hudson Canyon to spread out on the shelf."
Another marine geologist at Lamont-Doherty, Cecilia M. McHugh, said, the new maps are great work that will allow scientists to track contaminants from six abandoned dump sites off New York Harbor.
The response is gratifying to professor Rona, who spent three weeks in 2002 on a research vessel traversing the region to gather the data. Starting 200 miles out at sea, the Ronald L. Brown would travel on a 60-mile line roughly parallel to the coast as a multi-beamed sonar system attached to the keel bounced sound waves off the ocean floor more than a mile below.
The shape and depth of the sea floor was determined by how long it takes for the sound to return to the ship and the speed of sound through the water.
After completing each line, the vessel would then move closer to the coast to scan a new 60-mile long swath. It repeated this process about 50 times, covering a rectangle 100 miles long and 60 miles wide - 6,000 square miles.
The vessel, provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, readily weathered a hurricane and 25-foot waves.
"You can't do much. You hang on," said Rona, whose career has carried him across the seven seas, including time in tiny submarines 3 1/2 miles under the ocean surface.
Over the next four years, Rona and his team "cleaned" the data, removing extraneous matter caused by waves and other noises.
"It was all done for less than $1 million. It was very cost-effective," Rona said.
The team included researchers from Rutgers, the U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and Stony Brook University in New York.
Rona said the map is the most comprehensive ever done of the region, yet it only illuminated formations larger than a football field.
He is seeking funding to get greater detail by sending unmanned submarines to locations of special interest. These diving robots can take photos, sediment samples and measure ocean chemistry.
Rona said he suspects that such data could give clues on whether collapsed pits seen on the ocean floor resulted from old or recent landslides, and whether methane is being emitted.
The area's centerpiece is the giant underwater chasm called the Hudson Canyon. "It's the largest submarine canyon off the East Coast of the United States, and one of the largest submarine canyons in the world," Rona said.
From its shallow beginning at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, the Hudson Shelf Valley becomes the Hudson Canyon, which extends some 450 miles out from shore. In places its walls rise three-quarters of a mile from the canyon floor.
That makes it comparable to the Grand Canyon, whose rims are over a mile above the Colorado River, which winds through the gorge for over 270 miles.
Much of the Hudson Canyon was formed during the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, when the sea level was about 400 feet lower and the mouth of the Hudson River was near the edge of the continental shelf, about 100 miles east of its present site. The river discharged sediment that helped carve the canyon, aided by underwater avalanches of mud and sand, scientists said.
© 2006 America Online, Inc.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press
***
Sea Floor Topography and Backscatter Intensity of the Hudson Canyon Region Offshore of New York and New Jersey
By Bradford Butman1, David C. Twichell1, Peter A. Rona2, Brian E. Tucholke3, Tammie J. Middleton4, and James M. Robb1
usgs.gov (http://usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/index.html)
2006
Introduction (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/html/intro.html)
These maps show the sea floor topography and backscatter intensity of the Hudson Canyon region on the continental slope and rise offshore of New Jersey and New York. Sheet 1 (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/images/pdf/sht1_shaded.pdf) shows sea floor topography as shaded relief. Sheet 2 (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/images/pdf/sht2_back.pdf) shows sea floor topography as shaded relief with backscatter intensity superimposed in color. Both sheets are at a scale of 1:300,000 and also show smoothed topographic contours at selected intervals. The maps are based on new multibeam echo-sounder data collected on an 18-day cruise carried out aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ship Ronald H. Brown during August and September 2002. Additional multibeam data of the Hudson Canyon collected by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), on the continental shelf collected by the STRATAFORM project (Goff and others, 1999), and a survey of the Hudson Shelf Valley (Butman and others, 2003), and a compilation of bathymetric data from the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) Coastal Relief Model provide coverage of areas surrounding Hudson Canyon. Interpretations of the surficial geology also utilize widely spaced 3.5- and 10-kiloHertz (kHz) high-resolution seismic profiles collected by the U.S. Geological Survey.
***