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An ancient, methane-spewing volcano has been discovered at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The volcano, which lies at the center of a 1,000-foot-wide crater at a depth of 1,300 feet, likely formed as a result of a catastrophic burst of underwater methane at the end of the last Ice Age, researchers suggest.
A team from UiT Norway’s Arctic University and REV Ocean discovered the explosive structure on May 7, 70 miles south of Norway’s Bear Island in the Barents Sea.
“Seeing an underwater eruption in real time reminds me how ‘alive’ our planet is,” Giuliana Panieri, the expedition leader and principal researcher for the UiT project, said in a statement.
The volcano itself—which the research team named the Borealis Mud Volcano—is fairly small, measuring only 8 feet tall and 23 feet wide. It is what is known as a mud volcano, a geological phenomenon that is formed from pressurized sediment beneath the earth’s surface. According to the United States Geological Survey, this pressure can result from the earth’s tectonic activity or from the accumulation of hydrocarbon gases like methane.
Mud volcanoes are not the same as the large, lava-spewing mountains we tend to associate with the word. However, they can still be extremely powerful. For example, in 2021, an enormous mud volcano in Azerbaijan erupted near a Caspian Sea oil field, producing a dramatic fireball as the methane gas inside it was set alight.
The newly discovered volcano, and the crater surrounding it, were likely formed as a result of the accumulated pressure beneath the thick ice sheet that once covered the Barents Sea during the last Ice Age. The weight of the ice would have trapped methane gas in the earth’s crust, only to be released in a dramatic explosion when the ice began to melt.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that can produce 28 times more global warming than carbon dioxide when compared on a 100 year timescale. However, whether methane emitted from the sea floor actually makes it to our atmosphere is unclear.
For example, a study published in the journal Science in 2011 found that after the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, a large community of methane-digesting bacteria emerged and apparently guzzled the majority of the released gas before it could escape into the atmosphere.
The research group from UiT found a high density of bacteria and marine life around the newly discovered crater, which likely benefit from the methane-rich environment in which they live.
“Exploring the seabed and discovering new methane insights is like finding hidden treasures,” Stefan Buenz, one of the leaders of the expedition, said in a statement. “It is full of surprises…Every time we go down to the seabed, we get the feeling that we have just begun to understand the great and incredible diversity of such insightful systems.”
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