Oceanographic data collected in support of the NOAA VENTS Program from 1984 to 2001

The VENTS Program was established in 1983 with the goal of quantifying the impact of mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal venting on the oceans. Early successes included unexpected discoveries of boiling hydrothermal fluids in the deep sea and the instantaneous release of massive hydrothermal discharges dubbed “megaplumes” or “event plumes.” These observations showed, for the first time, that seafloor eruptions catalyze the exchange of large quantities of heat and chemicals between the Earth’s crust and the overlying ocean, and led to the discovery that these releases also include heat-loving microorganisms that live in the “subsurface biosphere” below the seafloor. These realizations spurred VENTS to develop new technologies for studying such events, including the remote detection of seafloor eruptions.

Note: Preliminary metadata for this dataset was extracted from a legacy database maintained by the U.S. National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). The design of the database did not exactly reflect the FGDC Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM).

Principal Investigator (PI) and organization contact information accurately represents all available information from the legacy database at the time that this description was created. However, proper attribution of a PI to a specific institution or the role (submitting or collecting) taken by an institution may not be correct due to inexact mapping between fields in the legacy database and the CSDGM. Due to this uncertainty, the contact information was initially recorded in the Supplemental Information element of the CSDGM description.

To develop more accurate metadata, NCEI reviews metadata for all datasets on an ongoing basis.