Skadi Snowblower 2011

One of the most amazing events following the eruptions at Axial Seamount, are billions of microbes, and there biproducts, streaming from collapsed lava lakes at the summit of Axial Seamount. This video, taken with the remotely operated vehicle ROPOS it 2011, shows snowblowers three months after the 2011 eruption. Organisms streaming out of the collapsed zones are high temperature microbes that thrive on volcano carbon dioxide and produce methane. It is likely that snowblowers are common during seafloor eruptions along the mid-ocean ridge network, however, they are ephemeral  – and rarely are researchers at the right place at the right time to catch one of these events. Smaller snowblowers were seen at the summit of the 127 m thick lava flow formed during the Axial 2015 eruption. Here, the summit of the flow was covered by acres of orange microbial mats and localized snowblowers issuing from between pillow basalts. Credit: UW/NSF-OOI/CSSF-ROPOS, V11.