Discovering hydrothermalism from Afar: In Situ methane instrumentation and change-point detection for decision-making
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feart-10-984355.pdf
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Author(s)
Preston, Victoria
Flaspohler, Genevieve
Kapit, Jason
Pardis, William
Youngs, Sarah
Martocello, Donald E.
Roy, Nicholas
Girguis, Peter R.
Wankel, Scott D.
Michel, Anna P. M.
Date Issued
October 25, 2022
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Citation
Preston, Victoria, Flaspohler, Genevieve, Kapit, Jason, Pardis, William, Youngs, Sarah et al. 2022. "Discovering hydrothermalism from Afar: In Situ methane instrumentation and change-point detection for decision-making." 10.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Seafloor hydrothermalism plays a critical role in fundamental interactions between geochemical and biological processes in the deep ocean. A significant number of hydrothermal vents are hypothesized to exist, but many of these remain undiscovered due in part to the difficulty of detecting hydrothermalism using standard sensors on rosettes towed in the water column or robotic platforms performing surveys. Here, we use in situ methane sensors to complement standard sensing technology for hydrothermalism discovery and compare sensors on a towed rosette and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) during a 17 km long transect in the Northern Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California. This transect spatially intersected with a known hydrothermally active venting site. These data show that methane signalled possible hydrothermal-activity 1.5–3 km laterally (100–150 m vertically) from a known vent. Methane as a signal for hydrothermalism performed similarly to standard turbidity sensors (plume detection 2.2–3.3 km from reference source), and more sensitively and clearly than temperature, salinity, and oxygen instruments which readily respond to physical mixing in background seawater. We additionally introduce change-point detection algorithms—streaming cross-correlation and regime identification—as a means of real-time hydrothermalism discovery and discuss related data supervision technologies that could be used in planning, executing, and monitoring explorative surveys for hydrothermalism.
Subjects
General Earth and Planetary Sciences
MIT Department
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2022.984355
