Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 119 (2014): 2543–2566, doi:10.1002/2013JB010478.
Description:
We deployed autonomous temperature sensors at black smoker chimneys, cracks, and diffuse flow areas at the Lucky Strike hydrothermal field (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, ~37°17'N) between summer 2009 and summer 2012 and contemporaneously measured tidal pressures and currents as part of the long-term MoMAR experiment to monitor hydrothermal activity. We classify the temperature data according to the hydrogeologic setting of the measurement sites: a high-temperature regime (〉190°C) representing discharge of essentially unmixed, primary hydrothermal fluids through chimneys, an intermediate-temperature regime (10–100°C) associated with mixing of primary fluids with cold pore fluids discharging through cracks, and a low-temperature regime (〈10°C) associated with a thermal boundary layer forming over bacterial mats associated with diffuse outflow of warm fluids. Temperature records from all the regimes exhibit variations at semi-diurnal tidal periods, and cross-spectral analyses reveal that high-temperature discharge correlates to tidal pressure while low-temperature discharge correlates to tidal currents. Intermediate-temperature discharge exhibits a transitional behavior correlating to both tidal pressure and currents. Episodic perturbations, with transient temperature drops of up to ~150°C, which occur in the high-temperature and intermediate-temperature records, are not observed on multiple probes (including nearby probes at the same site), and they are not correlated with microearthquake activity, indicating that the perturbation mechanism is highly localized at the measurement sites within the hydrothermal structures. The average temperature at a given site may increase or decrease at annual time scales, but the average temperature of the hydrothermal field, as a whole, appears to be stable over our 3 year observation period.
Description:
This project was
funded by CNRS/IFREMER through the
2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 cruises
within the MoMAR program (France)
and by ANR (France) Mothseim Project
NT05-3 42213, led by J. Escartín. T.
Barreyre was supported by University
Paris Diderot (Paris 7—France) and
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
(IPGP, France).
Description:
2014-10-02
Keywords:
Hydrothermal activity
;
Time-series
;
Spectral analysis
;
Tidal forcing
;
Temperature variations
;
Mid-ocean ridge
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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