[Coral-List] Champagne continued.

[John Ware]

I now have some more information about the Champagne dive site on 
Dominica and some additional information, so here goes:

1- My apologies for stating that the paper in Nature was by Spencer-Hall 
et al.  It is by Hall-Spencer et al. (at leasts I got the "al" right). 
 Nature 454:96.

2- Thanks much to Sonia Rowley who called my attention to the excellent 
paper: "Geochemistry of Champagne Hot Springs shallow hydrothermal vent 
field and associated sediments. Dominica, Lesser Antilles" (Chemical 
Geology 224 (2005): 55-68.  I must admit that my limited chemical 
knoweldge prevents me from fully grasping the total import of this 
paper.  However, what this paper points is that there is a lot more 
going on then just some CO2 bubbling up.  There are fluids and 
precipitates with lots of stuff in them.

3- This got me to thinking (which should have been obvious with some 
thought) that the location which Hall-Spencer et al. looked at must have 
the same sort of problems.  However, Hall-Spencer et al. did not mention 
any possible confounding issues, although they stated that "Some marine 
CO2 vents are at ambient saltwater temperature and lack toxic sulphur 
compounds".   There was no specific statement that the vent they 
investigated fell into that category.  So now I am not sure how to 
interpret the Hall-Spencer results which really only discuss CO2 and not 
all the other stuff that could be going on.

I am sure that somebody will straighten me out.

John

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