'Polar' researcher to track hot spots

ohn Tarduno has spent four of the last five summers well above the Arctic Circle, camping out in tents for six weeks at a time and chasing down long-dead turtles and crocodile-like beasts. This summer offers a change of pace.

Instead of enduring snow and freezing rain, the professor of geophysics and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences will lead cruise to the Pacific Ocean, tracking the geological feature that gave birth to the Hawaiian Islands.

Tarduno is one of two scientists chosen to lead a two-month expedition to trace a series of seamounts and atolls created long ago by the same volcanic "hot spot" that more recently formed Hawaii.

More than 100 scientists, engineers, and crew members from around the world will take part in the project, which sets sail from Yokohama, Japan, on July 2.

"Results of our project could wind up challenging some of the basic concepts about our planet that we teach everyday in the classroom," says Tarduno.

Sailing aboard a deep-sea research vessel capable of retrieving some of the most remote rocks on the planet the entire mission revolves around some very fancy rock collecting. The ship is equipped with a giant drill pipe that is lowered to the ocean floor, usually a mile or more below the water surface. Researchers will drill deep beneath the ocean floor until they reach the rocks whose tales could offer answers to longstanding questions about the forces that shape the earth and govern its future.

A central question today concerns "hot spots," giant plumes of molten rock that pepper the planet and well up from deep within the earth. The plumes can act like blowtorches that burn through the crust, creating chains of volcanoes or islands. The best known is the hot spot that created the Emperor Chain of islands (including Hawaii), atolls, and seamounts.

Tarduno and his team, including University graduate researcher Rory Cottrell, have found some of the best evidence yet that hot spots are actually on the move. Yet, many scientists still assume that hot spots are fixed in place and that they form chains of islands only when a tectonic plate moves over them. While plates certainly move, Tarduno says that hot spots themselves move, too.

Tarduno's team will visit at least six seamounts in the Emperor Chain, spending about a week at each. At each site the ship will drill to extract a core of rock about half a foot wide and anywhere from 300 to 1,000 feet long. Those rocks, which formed long ago from molten lava spewing forth from the innards of the Earth, will be brought on board, studied extensively during the cruise, and then divvied up among dozens of scientific teams for further analysis.

The team will depart from Japan and will head north 1,500 miles, beginning their studies in Russian waters at a seamount approximately 90 million years, the oldest geologic "cousin" of the Hawaiian Islands. From there they'll work their way south, far off the coast of Kamchatka, stopping at several seamounts along a 3,000-mile route. As they move south they'll move on to younger and younger seamounts, eventually studying one 48 million years old.

Scientists will try to discover the rocks' origin by testing for their "magnetic signatures." At the University, Tarduno runs a sophisticated paleomagnetic laboratory, where he and the researchers measure rocks' precise magnetic signatures.

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