Location: Off the coast of South America
0° 3'46.83"S 24°51'57.11"W
Tectonic Activity and Results: Submarine Volcanoes and Volcanic Vents
Recent Activity: Constant Volcanic growth, Plates move 2 cm away from each other per year
My second stop was the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, sense the top of the ridge is on average 8,200 feet below sea level we traveled down in a Bathyscaphe (mini-sub. A bathyscaphe cock pit is roughly six feet in diameter and has huge floats above it full of aviation gasoline. It weighs six tons in the water due to the amounts of reinforcement and layers need to achieve huge depths. After viewing the peaks of part of the largest mountain range in the world we decided send it deeper. I also saw the amazing tube worms. Did you now they can grow to over 6 feet and live over 250 year? Its a worm!
After some time our sub descended to the bottom of the the flank. At around 24,600 feet under the sea the world seems alien. I was somewhat worried by the fact that if the sub broke I would be subjected to over 1000 atmospheres of pressure, but I was distracted by the amazing scenery I could see through the tiny porthole. At the bottom I was surprised to see some light, it was the quickly cooling magma of a volcano. This confused me at first. I knew it was a divergent plate boundary where the plates moved away from each other. So how? I asked the Alan Williams (the pilot and also a vulcanologist) why there was a mountain range formed here? He said that as the plates moved away from each other, magma seeped up and cooled forming the base of that mountain. The lave continued to seep to the top making the mountains higher, and all along the boundary this was happening forming the largest mountain range in the world. So I took lots of pictures and we headed back up. I had the weirdest feeling going back up, knowing I would never see that different world again.
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