[Coral-List] Champagne continued.

Douglas Fenner dfenner at blueskynet.as
Thu Jan 8 01:43:53 EST 2009


The Nature paper states that
Some marine CO2 vents are at ambient

seawater temperature and lack toxic sulphur compounds

(and,)

We studied cold vent areas off Ischia in Italy (Fig. 1) where sea

water was being acidified by gas comprising 90.1-95.3% CO2, 3.2-6.6% N2, 
0.6-0.8% O2, 0.08-0.1% Ar and 0.2-0.8% CH4 (no sulphur).

That seems a pretty clean bill of health.  Further, there is the built in 
control that the calcarious organisms dropped out near the vent, and their 
shells were photographed deteriorating, while non-calcareous organisms were 
abundant and looked healthy in the vent field.  I trust that they didn't see 
things other than the bubbles being released.  Whatever the active agent 
was, it was pretty specific in its action on calcareous organisms.
     I say this as a non-chemist who knows nothing about what volcanoes 
release, other than that sulfur compounds are common (and usually 
sty).   -Doug

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Ware" <jware at erols.com>
To: <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 4:07 AM
Subject: [Coral-List] Champagne continued.


>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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