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A DSL-120 sonar record collected today from the East Pacific Rise crest near 9° 48’N latitude. The blue line shows the path of the sonar “fish“. Bright areas on the record are where a lot of echoes are returned to the sonar fish from bumpy areas on the seafloor. Darker gray areas on the record are places that are either smoother and so they reflect less sound energy, or are in an “acoustic shadow” and so did not receive the sound ping.

We have outlined the border of a lava mound. We think the crater is where lava poured out of the seafloor and then flowed out to form the mound, which is several hundred meters in diameter. On the other side of the path of the sonar “fish”, the long linear features are fissures or large cracks in the seafloor. We have lots of work ahead of us identifying all the seafloor structures that we see in these sonar records.

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