Surprise! The discovery of a piping hot magma chamber, unexpectedly hit during routine drilling operations, has researchers thrilled.
Credit: Jonathan Lewis
SAN FRANCISCO: In an accidental discovery, scientists have made the first-ever contact with magma in its natural underground environment.
The surprise finding came when a crew, routinely drilling for a geothermal energy company on Hawaii's Big Island, hit a chamber of the molten rock 2.5 km beneath the surface.
History before our eyes
The discovery is unprecedented, said Bruce Marsh, a U.S. geologist from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
"[It's] like Jurassic Park," he said, likening this "singular event of first contact with inner Earth" to palaeontologists being given the opportunity to watch dinosaurs roam the countryside.
The discovery is also unusual due to the uncommon type of magma found, said geologist William Teplow, from renewable energy company U.S. Geothermal in Boise, Idaho.
Both Marsh and Teplow were part of the team who presented the findings at today's meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.
Rock solid
The magma stumbled upon was a light-coloured volcanic dacite, never before found on the Big Island of Hawaii and chemically distinct from the basalt lava and rock typically observed, Teplow said.
It has been thought that dacite can be formed from basalt through a natural crystallisation and distillation process, and that dacite in turn can harden into rocks similar to those comprising the granite core of Earth's continents.
The shock magma find, then, means scientists may be directly observing what happened during continental formation. "This may be the first time this process of the generation of granite has actually been observed taking place in nature," Teplow said.
Full steam ahead
"This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the science," said Marsh, who believes the discovery location to be a prime site for further research, magma sampling and exciting new discoveries - a "magma observatory" of sorts.
There are also commercial prospects being considered - the magma chamber, with an estimated temperature of 1050 °C, may be the hottest geothermal well ever drilled, the scientists said. It could therefore become a bountiful source of high-temperature steam for electrical power generation.
But scientific research will continue to be a priority, assured Lucien Bronicki, chairman of the Nevada company that owns the well field, Ormat Technologies. "Our plan is to cooperate with the scientific community to effectively produce power out of this system," he said.
