REAL DATA

My name is Matthew Pruis and I'm a graduate student at the University of Washington, School of Oceanography. My interest in magnetics stems from my desire to know how the magnetic intensity of the rocks that make up the ocean crust varies with time. It is for this reason that my advisor and I placed five seafloor magnetometers on the sea floor last summer, Sept 1995. The magnetometers were positioned on the site of the 1993 lava eruption that occurred on the CoAxial Segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge (located about two hundred miles off the coast of Oregon). Obviously if one is interested in the decay of crustal magnetization with time, a good place to start is with near zero-age crust. We have predicted that the intensity of the new rocks created by this eruption will initially have a high magnetization and that this value will rapidly decay. Regrettably, the seafloor magnetometers are still on the bottom of the ocean, so I can't tell you if our hypothesis is correct. This also means there are NO NUMBERS in this Real Data section. I appologize to all you number crunchers out there. We will be picking up the seafloor magnetometers on a cruise departing 1 Sept 1996. If your interested, the results will be posted in real time on the Web while we are still out to sea, So keep tuned!

The seafloor magnetometers were deployed last summer using the submersible ALVIN. This experiment is unusual in that the CoAxial eruption is one of the first eruptions on the seafloor that was caught while the eruption was happening. This has enabled us to deploy magnetometers on the lava flow within two years of the eruption. Hopefully, we will recieve some interesting data off of these instruments. But we didn't sail the high ocean simply to place some magnetometers on the bottom of the ocean, we also collected a large number of ocean bottom gravity measurements using a gravity meter that was mounted inside ALVIN . Geologists were also on board getting a close-up look at new ocean crust being formed at a Mid-ocean Ridge. Also collecting valuable data was the AUV Abe , that ran many near-bottom magnetometer surveys. And finally, a new measurement tool was deployed that can measure bare-rock heatflow.

This page is currently in a stage of great flux and I imagine many alterations in the near future. So please be patient with its construction. I should have real numbers soon!!! As a parting note, I would like to answer all those critics out there who cannot help but to ask why should all this effort be spent using submersibles and diving to the depths of the ocean, simply to observe and measure the physical properties of a new lava flow.