LUTHERAN QUILTERS – Members of the Quilts for Comfort Group stand between pews draped with some of the 205 quilts they made, in the Sitka Lutheran Church Tuesday. The group made the quilts for five local non-profits and one in Anchorage. The remaining quilts are sent to Lutheran World Relief which  distributes them to places around the world in need, such as Ukraine, as part of Personal Care Kits. Pictured are, from left, Helen Cunningham, Kathleen Brandt,Vicki Swanson, Paulla Hardy, Kim Hunter, Linda Swanson and Sue Fleming.  (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

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Daily Sitka Sentinel

Sitka-Funded Project Discovers Volcano

By TOM HESSE

Sentinel Staff Writer

An actively venting volcano has been discovered in the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault system, which lies off the coast of Southeast Alaska and British Columbia. 

Last Friday scientists with the Sitka Sound Science Center and the Geological Survey of Canada located the volcano 1,000 meters below sea level near Dixon Entrance, just north of the Alaska-Canada border.

 

A computer screen shot shows a scientific sounder’s side view of a volcano on the Alaska Canadian boundary northwest of Haida Gwaii, near Dixon Entrance. (Image provided by Sitka Sound Science Center)

H. Gary Greene, a Ph.D and senior scientist working through the nonprofit science center in Sitka, was a principal investigator on the study. He said they found the volcano while studying the geological fault in the earth’s crust. 

“It was pretty evident what it was,” he said. “We went over it with a series of sounders. Echo sounders and just the morphology of it, the cone shape, tells you immediately it was a volcano.”

The data also revealed a gas plume rising from the crater that reached about 700 meters – evidence that the volcano was actively venting gas. 

“It was in a place that was unexpected. It was serendipitous that we found it,” Greene said. 

The volcano will play a big role in the study conducted by Greene and Geological Survey of Canada researcher Vaughn Barrie, on the rate of slippage in the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault system. The work is funded through the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards program, which wants to find out more about fault areas to better understand and respond to potential earthquakes and tsunamis.

Greene said there’s little known about this area except that it’s of major importance as a seismic region. 

“This fault zone is a very major plate boundary. It is not insignificant. It has gone unstudied and this thing, as far as plate motion and impact is concerned, is much more significant than the San Andreas fault,” Greene said. 

The San Andreas fault has received far greater study because it lies under heavily populated areas, Greene added. 

The Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault system marks the boundary between the North American plate and the Pacific plate.

“What we were trying to do is determine its seismic hazard and we were trying to study how fast the fault is slipping,” Greene said. 

Greene and his crew are gathering samples to find out how much the plate has shifted and when that occurred. With enough data, they can get an idea as to how much movement is going on over how much time. 

The Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault system sits just above the well-known Cascadia Subduction Zone. A recent article in The New Yorker detailed how that area is overdue for a major slip that would generate a tsunami obliterating everything west of Interstate 5.

Greene said he studies the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault to find similar, but less alarmist, information. 

“For me the thing that I think is important is you study these faults and what their motion is to feed into the seismologists the best information we can so they can determine what the magnitude of a potential earthquake might be,” he said.

Should the people of coastal British Columbia and Southeast Alaska be alarmed by the new information?

“When we study things like this they get blown way out of proportion on the fear level,” Greene said. “I don’t think people should be worried about this. They should be excited about the information.”  

So what role does the volcano play in all this? Greene said it’s an indicator that fluids – gases and water – are affecting the movement of the fault. The researchers don’t know what type of volcano they’ve found yet. It could be a lava volcano or a mud volcano and it won’t be known which until more data is gathered. What is known is that the gas coming out of it is methane. 

Researchers reached this conclusion not by collecting samples of the gas but by photographing chemosynthetic clams and mussels living near the vent. These organisms are known to feed on methane gas. 

“They were there so they were a good indicator that there was probably methane coming out,” Greene said. 

The volcano may also reveal information about another undersea tsunami threat: landslides. The fluids may cause some instability in the underwater structures, and when a landslide is big enough – even if it’s hundreds of meters under water – it can generate a tsunami. 

“We’re talking kilometers. Something (a landslide) that’s a few kilometers wide and maybe 50-60 kilometers long,” Greene said. 

That’s the other part of the data that Greene and Barrie were collecting. Soil samples can show the stability of the ocean floor.

“It indicates that this is an area of failure, in other words there have been landslides there in the past. We wanted to find out if there were landslides big enough to cause significant tsunamis,” Greene said. 

A team of 15 researchers made the research trip on the Canadian Coast Guard Ship John P. Tully. The trip was already planned when the Sitka Sound Science Center secured the grant to fund Greene’s study. Science Center Research Director Victoria O’Connell said Greene was a scientist in residence two years ago, and when the money came available choosing him for the study was an easy decision.

“He’s done quite a bit of work on the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault and he had some questions,” O’Connell said. “It was an opportunity to get some great work done for not a huge amount of money.” 

The research grant was for around $100,000. As a research coordinator, O’Connell said she’s pleased to see the Science Center as a facilitator of local research. 

“One of the things that we try to do with research at the Science Center is we try to do locally relevant research. We have a goal of bringing in scientists from other areas and other institutions in to work here.” 

But as a Sitka resident and a past fisheries manager, she finds the project fascinating for other reasons. Underwater volcanos are important to fish habitat and of course there’s the natural curiosity of what’s happening along major fault systems.

“As a resident, what does that mean for us and what’s likely to happen next? We live on a very, very large fault. We actually live between two large faults here,” O’Connell said. 

The immediate goal for Greene and Barrie is to study the information they collected on this most recent trip. Next comes the search for more funding to get bathymetric data on the region to get an accurate picture of what the sea floor looks like. 

O’Connell said researchers would use a multibeam echosounder to get an idea of what the sea floor looks like and, hopefully, a better idea of what is happening on the fault system.

“It gives you really precise photographic images of the sea floor. We suspect there’s many cones there. We suspect that there’s many cones out there as well as landlsides and we’d like to image those,” Greene said.

 

 

 

 

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20 YEARS AGO

March 2004

Advertisement: Tea-Licious Tea House & Bakery 315 Lincoln Street Grand Opening! Freshly Baked Scones, Cakes & Pastries Innovative Salads, Soups & Sandwiches Harney & Sons Tea. Lunch * Afternoon Tea * Supper.

50 YEARS AGO

March 1974

Photo caption: National Republican Chairman George Bush takes a drink of water offered by Jan Craddick, Sitka delegate, during the Republican convention held here. Mrs. Craddick explained to Bush that the water was from Indian River, which means, according to local legend, that he will return.

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