The astronaut's wife

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Posted by H.V.O.M at 6:20 PM Friday, March 11, 2011


That damned dog has been goddamned barking almost constantly for a full day.





Am I the only person who ever goddamned call 9-1-1 because of these goddamned vermin and their goddamned vermin barking dog?

Lousy damned cowards.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 11 March 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: April 16 2011

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/16/11 2:17 PM
I am just now on page 286 of the paperback copy of "The Stand" and I decided to make this note because the text on page 286 begins by mentioning specifically that "Trash Can Man's" wrist was broken and he is running through the parking lot to get away from the huge gasoline storage tank he just set fire to and that reminds me of zombie chatter I heard when I was walking through the parking of the grocery store I was at about two hours ago. After I made my last internet blog post, about Gary Sinise, including his role in "The Stand," I very soon left my apartment and walked to the QFC grocery store. As I was walking through the parking lot of that grocery store, where the zombies are always doing something to annoy me, I heard the zombie chatter that reminds me of something I had just read about "Trash Can Man." I was also thinking about how in that last post I had decided - I made the conscious decision - to specifically refer to Microsoft as the headquarters of "limp-wristed lame-oid's."

As I have mentioned before, Bill Gates does have a very large atomic bomb buried under Seattle Washington somewhere.

The irony is that he will blow it up because he believe aliens will invade the planet Earth and the irony about that Bill Gates lame-oid is that the evil forces that pester Bill Gates mind constantly have been here on this planet all along and they hate humans. Those evil beings are going to use Bill Gates to render the surface of this planet uninhabitable to human and other animal life and there is nothing any one of us can do to stop her-him-it.

I try to figure what is going to set her off, which means that Microsoft's Bill Gates is going to order that large nuclear bomb to explode under Seattle. The ejecta from the surface will block out the Sun for a long time but the worst part is that there will be a tremendous of fallout returning to the surface of the planet. Fallout is material, such as dirt, that has mixed with radioactive material, such as plutonium and uranium, and that falls from the sky to the surface. Microsoft's Bill Gates atomic bomb is so large that any attempt to clean up the radioactive fallout will fail.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 16 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:10 PM
The next song that started playing on FM 95.7 is "please don't leave me." I think that song title is "Crying Man" but I am not certain. That was also a nickname of one of the dimensional travelers in the 1995 television series "Sliders." I am now changing the radio back to FM 102.5 KZOK. "When the walls come tumbling down" is in progress on that station. I've got to get back on track and try to build that test case. Some of these test cases don't work out because I do not have any data on my non-internet connected computer for research information.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:16 PM
Okay, this is the first good match I can find without giving away too many details by research on the internet. Even now, I was thinking, I am giving those thieving mobsters a lot of clues by describing how I research my test case. All they have to do is to watch my internet activity and they know I am working up a test case.





from 2:45 PM 10 May 2008 to 12:45 PM 12 April 2011 is 25606 hours.





From 9/24/1895 ( Andre Frederic Cournand ) To 11/2/1965 ( ) is 25606 days

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:20 PM
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099700/quotes

IMDb

The Internet Movie Database

Memorable quotes for

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)


Dr. Catheter: All they have to do is to eat three or four children and there'd be the most appalling publicity.





http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099700/quotes

IMDb

The Internet Movie Database

Memorable quotes for

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)


Peggy, the Lab Receptionist: Dr. Catheter, this just came for you.

Dr. Catheter: Ah, splendid. This must be my malaria.

[sees it's not]

Dr. Catheter: Rabies. I've got rabies, and I'm supposed to get the flu this week.

Peggy, the Lab Receptionist: I think we have the flu out on back order.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:23 PM
Okay, my next scheduled test is 12:45 PM 12 April 2011 and I will listen to FM 102.5 Seattle Washington radio for the information that is broadcast during that minute and I will listen for any details that seem to have a significant association to this test case as another test of time travel communication of which I have not been keeping count of the number of tests I have carried out so far. I need to go back and make a count.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:33 PM
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708782/quotes

IMDb

The Internet Movie Database

Memorable quotes for

"Star Trek: The Next Generation"

Tapestry (1993)


Lt. J.G. Jean-Luc Picard: I can't live out my days as that person. That man is bereft of passion... and imagination! That is not who *I* am!

Q: Au contraire. He's the person you wanted to be: one who was less arrogant and undisciplined in his youth, one who was less like me... The Jean-Luc Picard *you* wanted to be, the one who did *not* fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:44 PM
About 12:44:05 PM the song "I got something to say to you that might cause you pain" has started playing.

you can't do that

let you down and leave you flat

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:45 PM
On FM 102.5 Seattle Washington radio at 12:45:00 PM I hear the specific lyrics:

cause I'm the one who won your love


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 12 April 2011 excerpt ends]










http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1956/cournand-facts.html

Nobelprize.org

The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1956

André F. Cournand, Werner Forssmann, Dickinson W. Richards


Born: 24 September 1895, Paris, France

Died: 19 February 1988, Great Barrington, MA, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Columbia University Division, Cardio-Pulmonary Laboratory, Bellevue Hospital, New York, NY, USA

Prize motivation: "for their discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system"

Field: cardiovascular physiology










http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/241.htm

Tapestry [ Star Trek: The Next Generation ]

Stardate: Unknown

Original Airdate: 15 Feb, 1993


Q: So, if you had it to do all over again?

PICARD: Things would be different.










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/12/11 12:06 PM
After I started trying to build a test case around this journal entry, and after I started working on it, on FM 95.7 Seattle Washington the song has started playing "we hear you're leaving."

send it off in a letter to yourself

don't lose that number it's the only one you own

when you get home





JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 05/10/08 2:45 PM
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1407752448/tt0082971

Title: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Characters: Indiana Jones

Photo 3 of 103





http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eagles/hotelcalifornia.html

EAGLES LYRICS

"Hotel California"


Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 10 May 2008 excerpt ends]
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 12 April 2011 excerpt ends]










http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/241.htm

Tapestry [ Star Trek: The Next Generation ]

Stardate: Unknown

Original Airdate: 15 Feb, 1993


[Bonestell Facility casino]

MARTA: He's winning.

PICARD: Of course.

MARTA: I thought you had a date.

PICARD: She decided to leave.

MARTA: You're getting old, Johnny.

(Corey bounces his ball off a light and down a hole in the middle of the table)

COREY: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.

MARTA: Very, very nice. I think you should forget about Starfleet and play dom-jot for a living.

COREY: Nah, this is nothing. A little trigonometry, some minor wrist action. Now barokie, there's a game.

NAUSICAAN 1: Human! Play dom-jot, human.










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 10/11/10 6:27 AM
When I was last asleep, and I think was my waking dream just before I got up and out of bed, was of me being injured and I have been wondering ever since why I specifically saw the actor Eric Stoltz give me a United States military Bronze Star medal and I was lying on what seemed to be the ground. I have struggled with the sense though that I was actually in a hospital bed but in the dream I was clearly out in the field somewhere and as part of a US military operation. There were other people about but he is the only specific person I recall. He handed me the medal and I remember telling him that I would give it back when I got my own medal. Someone, a person that was never actually established in the dream, seemed to suggest that I would actually receive the US Navy Cross medal. In the dream, I had been injured after enemy forces hit me with a bayonet in the chest and as I think back about it now, because of where I was hit in the sternum, of which I was aware of sutures from surgery, should have been fatal. Ever since waking up though, I have been thinking that dream actually represents Kerry Burgess in the hospital after being shot in the shoulder. He was receiving a commendation and I don't know what that would have been but I guess that commendation was the equivalent. There was another detail I wanted to note here but now that detail slips my mind.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 11 October 2010 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: April 07 2011

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/07/11 1:02 AM
I generated that number '5160' by randomly selecting each number at a time. First, I closed my eyes, started flipping pages in the telephone book, stopped on a page with my eyes still closed, then I jabbed my sharp scientific instrument tool onto the page of the telephone book and held it there and then opened my eyes to see what was under the instrument. I had to do that several times before I had used my instument to stick the sharp end into an actual number and eventually, I generated the number '5.' I did the same thing over and over again until I generated the number '1' and then I did the same process over and over again until I got the last two numbers and I generated each number by itself using that process.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 07 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:37 PM
I just looked for matches in my journal and this is a match for a number that I generated by random:





From 3/4/1959 ( my birth date UK ) To 4/19/1973 ( premiere US film "Soylent Green" & premiere US film "High Plains Drifter" ) is 5160 days

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:38 PM
Now what am I going to do with it?

I am trying to generate a time of day and on that particular time of day I am going to listen to FM 102.5 KZOK Seattle Washington radio and listen for any details that seem to be significantly associated with the song that plays and other details that I think are significant.

So how do I turn '5160' into a time of day that happens soon this night?

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:41 PM
As it turns out, as I just calculated, 5160 minutes is precisely 86 hours so that is a nice, even number

I think I will look at the clock and just decide by simply looking at the clock a time of day this night and then I will count back 86 hours and see if I can find something that happened 86 hours earlier.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:44 PM
My target time is 11:30 PM this night.

Now to calculate back 86 hours.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:45 PM
There are web applications on the internet that can make these calculations quickly but I am trying to avoid using the internet as much as possible and I am doing this work on my computer.

The problem will be if I cannot match that past time and date with any that is not already documented in my journals. I would have to then look it up online and that would give the racketeering mobsters that are actively working to steal my private property an idea of what I am looking for.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:47 PM
Three days and 14 hours equals 86 hours.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:48 PM
So if the target time is 11:30 PM 5 April 2011 then going back 86 hours generates the time and date of 9:30 AM 2 April 2011.

Of course, if I look up that date and time on the internet that how is it even possible that the mobsters that are stealing my private property would know that I am listening to what they are doing at 11:30 PM in relation to what happened at 9:30 AM 2 April 2011?

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:53 PM
I didn't record anything in my journal at 9:30 AM that day.

That day was a Saturday.

This is more difficult than I thought it would be.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 9:59 PM
That isn't working. Instead of 'minutes' I will try 'hours.'

That seems to be 215 days. 5160 divided by 24 equals 215.

So that makes a target time and date of 11:30 PM 2 September 2010.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 10:09 PM
All right, my next candidate for time travel communication is the David Letterman show episode on 2 September 2010 and with a focus on the guest Karen Elson who is with The Citizens Band.

I always tend to think of those late night television series starting at 11:30 PM, I thought to myself as I noted that the tv.com website indicates that television program begins at 11:35 PM. So my target time tonight will be 11:35 PM. I will listen for the song that is playing on FM 102.5 KZOK Seattle Washington radio at 11:35 PM tonight, which is slightly more than an hour from now.

For my next test, not including the one at 5:00 AM tomorrow morning, if I am still awake, will be a different method I thought of as I was creating this test case.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 10:16 PM
I need to think about this time adjustment I made in this next test. Those mobsters would have seen me reviewing the David Letterman show and so they might guess to schedule something tonight at 11:35 PM since they also know I am running these tests.

I will listen for both times.

I will record what is playing at 11:30 PM tonight as well as 11:35 PM.

My next test case that I implement, other than the one at 5:00 AM, will not have that problem.

Also, this test case would not have that problem if I was not using a random number that produces an even number of days.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 11:30 PM
On FM 102.5 KZOK Seattle Washington radio an advertisement about KIA cars is playing.

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 11:32 PM
About 11:32:25 on FM 102.5 KZOK Seattle Washington radio the Peter Gabriel song "Solsbury Hill" has started to play after the advertisements end:

could see the city light

time stood still

eagle flew out of the night

he was something to observe

son he said grab your things I've come to take you home

walked right out of the machinery

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 11:35 PM
On FM 102.5 KZOK Seattle Washington radio about 11:35:00 the same song is still playing and I heard the specific lyrics:

never where I want to be

liberty she


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 05 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/05/11 11:56 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solsbury_Hill

Solsbury Hill

Little Solsbury Hill (more commonly known as Solsbury Hill) is a small flat-topped hill and the site of an Iron Age hill fort. It is located above the village of Batheaston in Somerset, England. The hill rises to 625 feet (191 m) above the River Avon which is just over 1 mile (2 km) to the south. It is within the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It gives impressive views of the city of Bath and the surrounding area. The hill was immortalized in 1977 by Peter Gabriel in his song 'Solsbury Hill'.





http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/petergabriel/solsburyhill.html


PETER GABRIEL

"Solsbury Hill"

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night
He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing stretching every nerve
Had to listen had no choice
I did not believe the information
(I) just had to trust imagination
My heart going boom boom boom
"Son," he said "Grab your things,
I've come to take you home."

To keep in silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut
So I went from day to day
Tho' my life was in a rut
"Till I thought of what I'd say
Which connection I should cut
I was feeling part of the scenery
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart going boom boom boom
"Hey" he said "Grab your things
I've come to take you home."
(Back home.)

When illusion spin her net
I'm never where I want to be
And liberty she pirouette
When I think that I am free
Watched by empty silhouettes
Who close their eyes but still can see
No one taught them etiquette
I will show another me
Today I don't need a replacement
I'll tell them what the smile on my face meant
My heart going boom boom boom
"Hey" I said "You can keep my things,
they've come to take me home."


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 05 April 2011 excerpt ends]










1973 film "High Plains Drifter" DVD video:

01:13:25


Sarah Belding: Have you ever heard the name Jim Duncan?

The Stranger: I've heard a lot of things. Why?

Sarah Belding: He was town marshal here. He's lying out there in an unmarked grave. They say the dead don't rest without a marker of some kind. Do you believe that?

The Stranger: What makes you think I care?

Sarah Belding: I don't know. He's the reason this town's afraid of strangers. I was going to warn you about that. Pretty funny.










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: April 04 2011

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/04/11 12:09 AM
Seventy two more hours. In seventy two hours I will know if this is a blow out or not.

But why am I still feeling strongly compelled to make no more posts in my blog at http://hvom.blogspot.com?

What am I supposed to do on 7 April 2011?

There must be a reason I was feeling strongly compelled to stop posting on Wednesday, 30 March 2011, which is seven days before 7 April 2011.

Sometime recently, a few hours ago I think, I started thinking that maybe I am just being driven around in circles. I don't know why. They compell to do the stuff I do and I have no idea why I have to do it.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 04 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Posted by H.V.O.M at 4:10 PM Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2011/03/he-bought-marriage-engagement-ring-and.html


http://www.filmquipsonline.com/astronautswife.html

THE ASTRONAUT'S WIFE


Released 8/27/99


After a mission which almost killed astronauts Spencer Armacost (Depp) and Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes) during a routine extravehicular activity, NASA declares the two men "heroes" and throws a big party for them.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 30 March 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/04/11 12:35 AM
from 4:10 PM 30 March 2011 to 1:05 AM 4 April 2011 is 6305 minutes.





From 3/4/1959 ( my birthdate UK ) To 6/7/1976 ( my first landing the Saturn moon Phoebe and the Saturn moon Phoebe territory belongs to me ) is 6305 days


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 04 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/04/11 1:07 AM
At 1:05 AM by my desk clock radio which is fairly close to the time on my internet connected computer this song starting playing on FM 102.5 KZOK but I cannot remember the song title.


more more more

rebel yell

walk the walls for you babe

a thousand miles for you

give you all and have none

in the midnight hour she cried more more more

with a rebel yell she cried more more more


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 04 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/04/11 12:29 AM
If I have this figured correctly, as I am avoiding using a web application on the internet that does it quickly and I don't remember if Microsoft Outlook datediff calculates minutes although I think it does but I have not tried it and am doing it manually, then from 4:10 PM 30 March 2011 to 1:40 AM 4 April 2011 is 6330 minutes.





From 3/4/1959 ( my birth date UK ) to 7/2/1976 ( I intercepted the Comet Lucifer in the outer solar system and set to work at diverting it as Tom Reagan the civilian and privately financed astronaut in my privately financed nuclear-pulse propulsion spaceship ) is 6330 days


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 04 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/04/11 1:40 AM
That song ended at 1:40 AM by my clock and the next song that started was Bad Company:

here come the dancers one by one

you find you're dancing on a number nine cloud

It's all part of my rock and roll fantasy

It's all part of my rock and roll dream


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 04 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/02/11 4:30 AM
I have that same sense in my mind as I make notes here on my offline computer. I feel as though I have this sense of my notes registering with other people. Maybe I am just crazy.

But what about my dreams?

There is no possible explanation about how I made those associations in my dreams.

I am aware.

Of something. Something in my mind.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 02 April 2011 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 04/01/11 10:03 PM
Somehow I think I am being forced to *want* and wish for the end of world because the end of the world means I get to leave.

I think I am being forced to want the world to end.

Something about how wanting something to happen does not necessarily mean I am responsible for it actually happening.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 01 April 2011 excerpt ends]










http://discovermagazine.com/1999/mar/megaplumes

Discover


FROM THE MARCH 1999 ISSUE

In Search of Megaplumes

Imagine volcanoes that erupt with giant spinning plumes filled with microbes and other life that spin like a discus for months. Welcome to the strange, almost completely unknown life of undersea eruptions.

By Josh Fischman, Ron Miller Monday, March 01, 1999

A little more than a year ago, on the night of February 9, the 170-foot research ship Wecoma headed west from the Oregon coast into darkening rough seas. Within hours, the ship was trying to make its way into a gale that drove rain horizontally across the decks. By the next day 45-knot winds were jacking waves up to heights of 30 feet, conditions that could easily have smashed smaller vessels.
The relentless pounding continued for days. Oceanographer Ed Baker remembers February 14 as the worst night of all. Waves crashed and roared over the deck, blurring sky and sea. Then the wind would suddenly change direction without warning, propelling rollers into the ship from an entirely new angle. The Wecoma pitched and bucked violently in unpredictable jerks. "What you can't appreciate until you're out there is the whipping motion," says Baker.

"If you're not holding on, you can get thrown across the deck." Despite the storm, Baker, a researcher at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and his colleagues were determined to launch a half-ton deepwater probe into the Pacific from the roller-coaster decks. They knew that a mile below the Wecoma a volcano had blown its top, and only the most unholy of storms would keep them from collecting evidence of a newly discovered side effect of such an eruption: giant underwater twisters of hot water, called megaplumes, loaded with minerals and strange life-forms. As the deck crane cavorted wildly in the wind, the researchers gingerly lowered the probe--a cluster of sampling bottles held by a wire tether--over the side. Once the probe was in the water, they let the tether unspool for 40 minutes until the bottles were a mile underwater. They worried the whole time that the corkscrewing motion of the ship would snap the wire. Then they had to haul the load back aboard. "Swinging is a bad thing," Baker says, remembering the gyrations of the crane. If the bottles slammed against the hull, they would be destroyed. If they slammed against scientists and deckhands, someone would die.

Conditions deteriorated and the captain of the ship banished the scientists inside, where they passed hours trying to drink coffee that frequently flew out of their cups or trying to rest in tossing bunks that thrust them to the floor. Sleeping, Baker says, “was always an adventure.”

HOW THE PLANE SPITS OUT UNDERWATER HURRICANES

The night of the fourteenth was memorable not only because the seas were so rough but also because the researchers had to deploy an acoustic beacon the size of a telephone pole. In the dim glow of deck lights, the crew struggled on the Wecoma’s fantail. The hook of the crane crashed into the device. Although they didn’t know whether the beacon had been damaged, they set out a chain of fragile glass globes that would later bring the device back to the surface. Then they raised the 30-foot-long aluminum shaft. “It’s very heavy, yet very delicate as well,” Baker says. As the ship roared up the face of one wave and then plunged down the other side, the beacon began swinging back and forth. The crew grappled with the heavy lines. One deckhand lost his grip but then grabbed on again before the shaft could crash into anyone. Finally the crane lowered the instrument into the water. Baker remembers, “It went off without a hitch, but that was probably the scariest part of the trip.” Several days later, everyone was relieved when the beacon began broadcasting data. The voyage to the volcano and back took ten days, “probably the worst weather for ten days straight that I’d ever had at sea,” Baker says. But when the Wecoma docked in Oregon, he was a happy man, and not just because he was standing on terra firma. The data he and his colleagues had collected painted a picture of a far more violent spectacle on the seafloor than the scientists had experienced in a storm on the surface.

The first rumblings of that unseen spectacle had begun weeks earlier, on January 25. A network of sensitive hydrophones in the North Pacific, deployed by the U.S. Navy to listen for Soviet submarines, picked up a swarm of earthquakes at the summit of an undersea volcano called Axial. The quakes were a lot less subtle than the quiet hunters of the cold war: they sounded like freight trains rumbling by. Over the course of a day the quakes traveled 30 miles from the volcano, following a scar in the seafloor where two plates of the planet’s crust are pulling apart. The quakes shook loose the rock that had stopped up the volcano’s plumbing. Through the newly cleared rocky pipes came an inferno of molten rock and boiling water driven upward by the intense pressures and temperatures of the inner Earth miles below.

“It would have been pretty spectacular if you’d been down there in the early going and seen, really, a boiling cauldron of water popping up out of the seafloor,” Baker says. A typical volcano on land, such as Mount St. Helens, fills the sky with a plume of ashes when it erupts. But Axial belched forth an equally massive eruption of superhot water. That was followed by streams of lava, some as deep as six feet, flowing down the sides of the volcano. Along Axial’s flanks, fields of geysers suddenly pierced the ocean bottom, shooting up superheated jets of water darkened with heavy concentrations of minerals from Earth’s crust. “We estimated, roughly, that there were ten gigawatts of energy coming out of the volcano’s caldera,” Baker says. “By comparison, Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River puts out about one gigawatt, and that can provide energy for 3 million homes.”

The trip on the Wecoma was launched to find out what happens when all that energy breaks loose. Geophysicists have sketched the broad outlines of plate tectonics—how Earth’s molten mantle of lava rises up to the surface and turns into plates of rigid crust—but many mysteries remain. Answers are not easy to come by because they must be found at places like Axial, obscured by deep ocean. But in recent years researchers have learned how to place sensors on or near volcanoes like Axial. The instruments dropped by Baker and his fellow oceanographers, for example, measured water temperature, current flow, and the chemicals released during the eruption.

Baker was particularly interested in learning more about megaplumes, observed only seven times before. Hot geysers of water, such as those on Axial’s flanks, rise only a few hundred feet above the seafloor, then diffuse like a pall of low-hanging smoke. Megaplumes, however, can soar more than several thousand feet off the ocean floor and spin like slow but gargantuan tornadoes. They can be 12 miles across and travel hundreds of miles. “It’s a bomblike event,” says Baker, who was among a group of oceanographers who discovered the phenomenon in 1986. Shortly thereafter, the researchers dubbed the underwater cyclones megaplumes.

The plumes have attracted interest for three reasons. First, they’re new. “You don’t often get a chance to find something that’s not known to exist,” Baker says. “And this isn’t some tiny feature, like a little rock. This is a whole giant process that no one knew about.”

Second, megaplumes stir up huge amounts of ocean, carrying minerals and gases and heat almost to the sea’s surface. Vertical mixing doesn’t happen easily in the ocean. Cool, dense water tends to stay near the bottom and warmer buoyant water near the top. As they rise from the ocean’s depths, megaplumes may bring energy and food to animals in shallow water. “They could be doing things to the energy of the ocean that we don’t even know about,” says David Butterfield, a chemist at the marine environmental lab.

Third, megaplumes move great distances horizontally too. In their travels, they may have helped some of the oddest and oldest beasts in the world colonize the planet. A hydrothermal hellhole like Axial may seem like a poor choice for a home, but it supports vibrant communities. Bacteria, which feed on methane and other noxious chemicals, provide sustenance for three-foot-long hollow tube worms and tiny clams. These critters can live only in hot spots on the seafloor, yet they have been found all over the world. How do they cross vast nutrient-free expanses of the sea to find new places to live? Megaplumes, which remain intact, spinning and drifting for months and traveling hundreds of miles, could be mobile ecosystems. “Maybe they’re like express buses,” Baker says.

If so, the bus depot is a midocean ridge such as the Juan de Fuca, which runs right below Axial. The ridge’s hot material rises from deep inside Earth, cools at the top, then slides off on both sides to become yet more planetary crust. At various hot spots, the ridge crosses over vertical channels that rise from the mantle. Molten rock rises to within a mile of the surface of the seafloor and forms a magma chamber. There it lies, slowly bubbling away.

Above the chamber are the relics of past intrusions of the magma to the seafloor’s surface. Directly overhead is a layer of hardened vertical lava pipes—imagine a batch of pencils clutched together—known as dikes. On top of the dikes lies cooled, fractured lava called pillow basalt, rife with cracks and voids through which seawater circulates. This loose collection of rock and water is what we generally think of as the solid seafloor.

It’s hardly a stable situation. A hiccup from within the planet can drive more magma into the chamber, making it swell and send tremors through the rocks above. The pipe-shaped dikes can shift, suddenly making room for a new column of magma to force its way up through the pencil cluster. The new column of lava is hot—about 2200 degrees. The heat expands the water, percolating it through the loose layer above and shooting it through a seafloor laced with sulfur, methane, iron, and other chemicals. The geysers through which this water emerges are known as hydrothermal vents.

At particular hot spots, the magma breaches the surface repeatedly, forming a cone. Much as it does on land, the cone cools and turns solid, then a new lava flow breaks out from it, running down the flanks and beginning the process of making an undersea mountain. The process, repeated over thousands of years, creates volcanoes such as 5,000-foot-high Axial.

The Juan de Fuca Ridge has garnered a lot of scientific interest because it runs roughly parallel to the northwest coast of the United States only 300 miles offshore, making it relatively easy to get to. Axial lies on top of a segment midway along the ridge. In 1986 a research vessel carrying Ed Baker and his colleagues lay above a southern segment called Cleft.

“We wanted to map the ridge to see where vent fields were likely to be,” Baker says, riffling through the multicolored maps of the seafloor that clutter the desk in his Seattle office. A dark-haired man of medium build, Baker speaks deliberately, but his voice picks up speed as he tries to make a point. “We were doing something called a tow-yo, where you tow instruments behind the ship and send them up and down at the same time, in a sawtooth pattern. This lets you sample the water at different depths. All of a sudden, we started getting a bunch of plumelike signals up here”—the oceanographer raises his hands, indicating a point high above the seafloor—“in an area where there shouldn’t have been any plumes.

“We were using an instrument that measures the optical clarity of the water. It’s very simple, really. It shines a light from point A to point B. And if there is less light at the end, it’s because there are particles in the water. All of a sudden it started going up and up and up when it should have been zero, zero, zero!

“At first we thought, ‘Well, what’s wrong with the instruments?’ It took us a while to realize there wasn’t a problem. There were just plumes where there weren’t supposed to be plumes. Instead of plumes rising 200 meters above the seafloor, we had plumes 1,000 meters above it.

“We spent about four days towing around the area, and we started drawing a picture of this great big circle,” Baker continues. “We’d start moving through the circle and the readings would get higher and higher, then we’d get to the middle and move out the other side and the readings would drop off again. It was a perfectly symmetrical circle around this one spot on the ridge.”

So Baker began to visit other eruption sites at various segments of the Juan de Fuca Ridge and saw megaplumes at all of them. “The plumes are pretty distinctive,” he says. “They’ve got a definite top and bottom. Their temperature and salt content are different from the surrounding water. They’re warmer, and they’re more fresh. In part that explains why they rise so high: hot fluids are more buoyant than cooler ones.”

Eventually the megaplume cools down just enough to stop rising. At that point it is about 2 degrees warmer than the water at the seafloor and three-tenths of a degree warmer than the water surrounding the plume. That difference may not seem like much, but water has tremendous heat capacity. Raising water temperature by 1 degree requires 4,000 times more heat than raising the temperature of an equal volume of air.

Heat is a reason megaplumes maintain their shape. Heat causes water molecules to spread apart, making them much less dense than the surrounding water. Because fluids of different densities don’t like to mix, the megaplume hangs together. Another reason megaplumes live so long is that they spin. In 1996, at a segment known as the Gorda Ridge, Baker’s team spotted two megaplumes and dropped a sensor into one of them. Three months later the sensor popped back up to the surface and sent a description of its journey to a satellite. It had spun clockwise around the edge of the plume and then gradually moved toward the middle, as if caught in a giant eddy. Baker describes the plumes as similar to underwater hurricanes.

IS THE SEAFLOOR MORE LIKE A SPONGE OR A HOT PLATE?

How does a megaplume get started? What prompts such a massive explosion of hot water in such a short time? No one knows for certain, but two competing views have gained ground. One sees the seafloor as a suddenly squeezed sponge; the other sees it as a large hot plate heating the water above.

Ed Baker believes in the sponge theory. Megaplumes are squeezed out by the deep crust because plume water contains helium 3, an isotope that’s rare at the surface but more common in deep Earth. So he and others envision a magma dike shooting up from below, squeezing a massive amount of fluid out the top of the loose seafloor. “Water would come erupting out everywhere,” he says.

Yet Baker also realizes this theory has a problem: nature abhors a vacuum. “For every gallon of water leaving the crust, there’s got to be a gallon of water entering the crust. Water won’t get out unless something comes in to fill the vacuum. How does that happen?”

CRACKING THE SEAL

William Wilcox, a researcher at the University of Washington, has an answer: forget the vacuum. Wilcox notes that the fluid and gases such as helium and methane percolating through the seafloor are already under great pressure. An intruding magma dike might crack the seal at the top, like loosening the valve on a pressure cooker. Reduce the pressure and the water-gas mixture will expand, vastly increasing its volume. There would be enough to fill all the voids and cracks in the seafloor, eliminating any vacuum problem, while the excess would come boiling out to form a megaplume.

But when chemist Dave Butterfield looks at the fluid inside a megaplume, he sees something that doesn’t jibe with the big- sponge theory. “The chemistry of megaplumes and regular plumes is really different,” Butterfield says. “So it doesn’t look as if they are coming from exactly the same place.”

What stops Butterfield is the ratio of manganese to iron in megaplumes. Manganese leaches from seafloor rocks much more slowly than does iron. Because normal plume water spends a lot of time circulating through the loosely packed seafloor, it has time to pick up extra manganese, and the iron has time to settle out. Typically, this produces water with an iron-to-manganese ratio of 4 to 1. But in a megaplume, the ratio is closer to 10 to 1. The disparity led Butterfield to wonder whether the megaplume water wasn’t spending sufficient time within the seafloor but was instead rushing by it too quickly to pick up enough manganese.

He began envisioning megaplumes formed by the geologic hot-plate theory. “Now, I’m a chemist, not a modeler,” he cautions, but it’s not hard to imagine a magma dike breaching the seafloor and laying out 1200-degree lava over half a square mile. That would expose a lot of seawater to heat, but only once. The water would be warmed as it passed over the molten rock, like a pot of water on a hot plate, and start to rise before it had enough time to pick up manganese.

Baker doesn’t buy it. “I’m not convinced you can get the heat out fast enough that way,” he says. “These guys envision the megaplumes forming in a week or so. I think they happen in a much shorter time, days or hours.” And the hot plate doesn’t have enough heat to do it.

The voyage to Axial last February was supposed to test both theories. If researchers found a megaplume but no detectable large flows of lava, Baker could toss out the hot-plate idea permanently. So he set out sensors designed to track water flow along the ocean floor, changes in temperature, and the movement of the crust. The sensors were supposed to record the data, then bob up to the surface where they could be gathered.

RETURN TO AXIAL

On the return visit to Axial to retrieve the data during a calmer August, however, there were few clues, and the debate still rages. The instruments on the sides of Axial that measured current could have supported the squeezed-sponge model if they had measured a strong flow of water back toward the volcano to replace the expelled fluids. But one instrument couldn’t be found at all, and another was buried under new lava.

These frustrations are typical for underwater research. “You know, it’s not like being a chemist in a lab where you can say, ‘Okay, I want to do this kind of experiment to prove my theory.’ We’re sort of at the mercy of Mother Nature here,” Baker says. “And it’s not like being a geologist on land. We can’t necessarily get to where we want to go when we want to get there. So it takes longer to figure these things out than you might expect.”—J. F.

Their shape and movement result from a devilishly complex interaction between the rising plume and the sideways rotation of the planet. Moving up or down while going sideways produces a twist known as the Coriolis effect. It’s the reason bathtubs drain in a spiral, hurricanes rotate in a spiral, and megaplumes spin round and round. The megaplume Baker tracked was spinning at about 6.5 feet a minute, taking eight days to make a full rotation. (Some megaplumes can spin three times faster.) Viewed from the side, he says, a megaplume might initially look like a huge twirling mushroom, with a disklike top that tapers down to a long tail. Eventually the tail disappears and the megaplume takes on the form of a giant Frisbee.

On his most recent voyages, Baker has been trying to figure out how megaplumes form (see page 115) and where they go. He wonders whether megaplumes carry the gases of an eruption, such as carbon dioxide and methane and helium 3, as well as minerals such as sulfur and iron, to upper layers of the ocean where most plant and animal life resides. Plankton, for example, thrive on iron. An infusion of iron makes plankton bloom, starting a vast domino effect on the sea surface that alters food chains and possibly the atmosphere as greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are absorbed.

To find out the answers to these questions, Baker’s colleague Bob Embley is laying the groundwork for a long-term observatory at Axial that will be put in place early in the next century. He envisions a network of sensors and cameras on the seafloor, transmitting data to buoys near the surface, which in turn bounce the signals off satellites to Baker’s office in Seattle. This New Millennium Observatory (NeMO, for short) will also employ an autonomous submarine at a permanent mooring on the site so that a scientist, after hearing the rumbles of an upcoming eruption, can tell it to “please do survey number 5.”

Then, Baker says, with the memory of ten horrible days at sea still fresh in his mind, “I could dial up the results on the Web from the comfort of my home.”



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 11:59 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Monday 27 April 2015