LONDON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- British scientists have discovered a "smoking" volcano 3,500 yards below the surface of the Indian Ocean.
The BBC said Wednesday the team on board the research vessel RRS Charles Darwin made the find when they spotted a huge, dark plume of water, 700 yards thick and more than 24 miles wide, rising hundreds of yards above a lava-strewn valley on the Carlsberg ocean ridge.
"Black smokers," often teeming with exotic creatures, are known to exist in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans but their discovery in the Indian Ocean is new.
The smoky plume comes from iron-rich particles that solidify when hot mineral-laden fluids mix with cold deep-ocean water.
"If you think of a factory chimney pouring out smoke on a still day, the smoke goes vertically upwards but as it entrains air, eventually stops rising and starts to spread out," explained Dr Lindsay Parson, project leader of the mid-ocean ridge research group at Southampton Oceanography Center.
