[Rockhounds] Scientists Just Found a New Kind of Rock Under the Pacific Ocean

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

New basalt just dropped. An international team of scientists drilled nearly
a mile into the Pacific seafloor and extracted a variety of the volcanic
stone chemically and mineralogically different from any previously known
sort.

The team examined a 49-million-year-old outcrop of stone that formed just a
couple million years after the Ring of Fire, that famous half-moon of
volcanic activity that lines the Pacific Rim. For the first few million
years following its ignition, the ring burbled with a superheated intensity
the team says formed a unique type of stone.

They hauled up this evidence of Earth’s history from nearly 5 miles below
the ocean’s surface. Their analysis suggests the fires that forged the rock
were hotter and more expansive than previously thought. Their results were
published <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21980-0> last week in
Nature Communications.

“The rocks that we recovered are distinctly different to rocks of this type
that we already know about,” said co-author Ivan Savov, a geochemist and
volcanologist at the University of Leeds, in a university press release
<https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/uol-nbt032221.php>. “In
fact, they may be as different to Earth’s known ocean floor basalts as
Earth’s basalts are to the Moon’s basalts.”

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-just-found-a-new-kind-of-rock-under-the-paci-1846538838