Talk:Hydrothermal vent
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[edit] Add
I think somebody definitely add more to this article. Its so intresting and important.There is more to learn now from this page! It is in "english" now
[edit] Cold seeps
You can take these off the to-do list because they are not hydrothermal in nature. Cold seeps are formational brines which are leaking ut into the ocean. Rolinator 08:35, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] error
"Submarine hydrothermal vents (black smokers) were discovered along the East Pacific Rise in 1977." This statement as it stands is incorrect. Hydrothermal vents were discovered at the Galápagos Rift, which is separate from the East Pacific Rise, in 1977 and there were no black smokers there at the time, only diffuse flow vents.
Actually, http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/ps_vents.html I think this is what they're referring to when they talk about the hydrothermal vents. They only discovered life around them in 1977. They'd known about this kind of stuff for a while before that anyway.
[edit] Hydrothermal vents on Mars?
As Mars doesn't have any oceans, this strikes me as an odd speculation. Perhaps it was meant to be worded "Hydrothermal vents have been speculated to have existed on Mars"? What is the source for this speculation?
--192.100.124.219 13:50, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
- Search me. All I can think of is under the icecaps --Lancensis 20:35, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
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- Well, its great speculation but there won't be any there now I'd think, what with hydrothermal needing not only thermal energy (mars doesn't have any acxtive volcanoes?) but water, which Mars appears to lack. Certainly not enough for an ocean. Rolinator 07:27, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
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[edit] Groundaters
I had to take to the groundwater section. There is no such thing as "primordial water". While primordial volatiles (helium-3 springs to mind) are known and recognised, it is practically impossible to determine how long water has been trapped within the Earth as no dating can be performed on H2O. Therefore "primordial water" is a great idea, but it is never, ever used in scientific literature.
The best that can be said is that, within the broader term "ground water" you have components of meteoric water, magmatic water and metamorphic or formational brines. These water classes are recognised by dH and d18O stable isotopes, and in the case of magmatic waters, also by the presence of 3He. Formational brines, as far as I'm concerned, are different than metamorphic waters because of their salt content, chemical content, and age; you can date formational brines and metamorphic waters via several isotopes (Be, for instance, plus trittium, etc) and can determine the age of groundwaters and metamorphic or other sources.
When it comes, specifically, to hydrothermal fields, about 90% of the water comes from the ocean itself, drawn down by convection, or from the atmosphere and recent groundwaters (eg; New Zealand, Greenland, California). To say there is magmatic water is fine; but odds are you'd be laughed out of town for suggesting it contained water which was in the mantle since the Earth formed.Rolinator 07:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Expanding
They got featured on the current David Attenborough on the Beed and one thing they emphasised were the difference between hydrothermal vents in different areas (with ones in the Pacific being called Dragon ?? something) and I think that would be something worth highlighting (I'll watch the repeat and take notes). At the moment I am a bit concerned this article mirrors Black smoker and I suppose I'd like to see this as a more general article broken down with sections on each type of hydrothermal vent and the biology (extremophiles) [4]. I'd also like to mention relic hydrothermal vents found around the world in Ophiolites - I know the Troodos Mountains are one example. [5] "Black smoker chimney fragments in Cyprus sulphide deposits" [6]. Also can we confirm that hydrothermal vents aren't the same as black smokers? Answers.com draws from various encyclopedias and only Wikipedia suggests it is a broader term - the rst say it is an oceanographic term and the same really as black smoker. [7] In which case the two need merging. (Emperor 15:40, 12 December 2006 (UTC))
- A geyser on land is a hydrothermal vent (and here I'd include mud pools, hot lakes, etc etc). A black smoker is too; anywhere hydrothermal waters escape the rocks is a hydrothermal vent. So...there are reasons for not merging. Not all subsea hydrothermal fields result in black smokers or white smokers; some are too cool to result in sulphide precipitation but are still hot (say, 40-200 degrees). There's a spectrum, basically. If anything, black smokers could be merged in here without too much trouble.
- For examples of hydrothermal vents which are not black smokers; the hot springs of Yellowstone, California, New Zealand, Greenland, Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia, etc. Some of the see mounds in the Gibon Desert, South Australia, are hot groundwaters derived from the basement formations of the great artesian basin. So, ok, answers.com says that all hydrothermal vents are oceanographic, but it doesn't mean that its what geologists would recognise as a vent of hot groundwaters.
- There's no problem mentioning relict vents found in ophiolites or other marine volcanic sequences, so feel free to throw that in the article. Rolinator 23:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
