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The Pleiades expedition on board Scripps’ R/V Melville in 1976 added more clues to zero in on the Galápagos Rift vent site. (Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography) |
More clues from the Galápagos
The 1972 Southtow expedition to the Galápagos Rift had uncovered some intriguing evidence for hydrothermal vents, so Scripps scientists, led by Peter Lonsdale and Ray Weiss, returned for another look in May of 1976 aboard R/V Melville.
For this expedition, called Pleiades, the Deep-Tow “fish” was specially outfitted with new equipment attached to its belly. These included a new sensor to measure water temperature and a rack of bottles to sample deep-sea waters.
The sensor detected a narrow zone of water with temperatures about 0.2°C higher than the surrounding seawater. The spike rose up to 125 feet above the seafloor. Was it a plume of buoyant, venting hydrothermal fluids? Chemical analyses of the fluids collected in the special sampling bottles later indicated that a vent might well be there. The new evidence was exciting, but it was still circumstantial and did not prove the existence of hydrothermal vents.
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