Ocean floor

Natural diamonds are found in kimberlite of ancient volcanic "pipes," found in South Africa, Arkansas, and elsewhere. Diamonds are now also being recovered from the ocean floor off the Cape of Good Hope. About 30% of all industrial diamonds used in the U.S. are now made synthetically. 

Thallium occurs in crooksite, lorandite, and hutchinsonite. It is also present in pyrites and is recovered from the roasting of this ore in connection with the production of sulfuric acid. It is also obtained from the smelting of lead and zinc ores. Extraction is somewhat complex and depends on the source of the thallium. Manganese nodules, found on the ocean floor, contain thallium. 

Pig. 6. A 0.3-mm-diameter cosmic spherule coUected from the ocean floor. The particle is composed of oUvine, glass, and magnetite and has a primary element composition similar to chondritic meteorites for nonvolatile elements. The shape is the result of melting and rapid recrystaUi2ation during... 

N. A. Wogman, K. Chave, R. K. Sarem, eds., Inter-Universif Program of Research on Ferromanganese Deposits of the Ocean Floor, Seabed Assessment Program, Washington, D.C., 1973. 

New types of anodes have been developed and tested as shown in Fig. 16-5 to improve the possibility of maintenance and repair. They can be lifted onto a ship and repaired. The connecting cables are also replaceable. In shallow water, the anchorage must be accurately calculated because considerable dynamic stressing can occur in heavy seas. The ocean floor must be suitable for long-term anchorage. No supply ships must anchor in the area around the platform. This requirement alone often prevents the installation of impressed current anodes since the operator does not wish or is not able to restrict himself to these conditions. 

Since methane is almost always a byproduct of organic decay, it is not surprising that vast potential reserves of methane have been found trapped in ocean floor sediments. Methane forms continually by tiny bacteria breaking down the remains of sea life. In the early 197Qs it was discovered that this methane can dissolve under the enormous pressure and cold temperatures found at the ocean bottom. It becomes locked in a cage of water molecules to form a methane hydrate (methane weakly combined chemically with water). This "stored" methane is a resource often extending hundreds of meters down from the sea floor. 

Regardless of the "harvesting" method, before these vast methane hydrate reserves can become a viable energy source, ways must be found to minimize the impact to the ocean floor and ocean-bottom ecosystems, and to limit the amount of methane escaping into the atmosphere. 

Submersible base rigs. Flotational tanks built into the base are flooded so that the base rests on the ocean floor. The legs are constructed to the correct height for each site. 

Fixed rigs. Used in depths up to 1,500 ft (457 m), these rigs are imbedded in the ocean floor and tapered from bottom to top for stability. Compliant tower. Used in water depths from 1,500 to 3,000 ft (457 m to 915 m), these towers rely on mooring lines for stability. 

Production of crude oil and natural gas involves technologies that have become increasingly complex as the remaining resources have become more difficult to locate and remove from their subsurface locations. Many new discoveries are made in sediments below the ocean floor in deep-water, and thus require removal of the oil and gas through long water columns. Other situations now require directional drilling of wells so that production involves transfers along wells that arc far from vertical. 

Gas hydrates are an ice-like material which is constituted of methane molecules encaged in a cluster of water molecules and held together by hydrogen bonds. This material occurs in large underground deposits found beneath the ocean floor on continental margins and in places north of the arctic circle such as Siberia. It is estimated that gas hydrate deposits contain twice as much carbon as all other fossil fuels on earth. This source, if proven feasible for recovery, could be a future energy as well as chemical source for petrochemicals. 

The white solid was stable at the high pressure and low temperature (slightly above 0°C) that prevail at the ocean floor. When raised to the surface, the solid decomposed to give off copious amounts of ... 

FIGURE 16.9 Manganese nodules that litter the ocean floor are potentially a valuable source of the clement. 

A rich supply of manganese lies in nodules of ore that litter the ocean floors (Fig. 16.9). These nodules range in diameter from millimeters to meters and are lumps of the oxides of iron, manganese, and other elements. However, because this source is technically difficult to exploit, manganese is currently obtained by the thermite process from pyrolusite, a mineral form of manganese dioxide ... 

The topography and structure of the ocean floor are highly variable from place to place and reflect tectonic processes within the Earth s... 

The global atmospheric circulation acts as an enormous filtration system, which depletes high-latitude precipitation of heavy isotope-bearing water molecules. Because of this system, measurements of the stable isotopic composition of the ice sheets and of ocean-floor sediments reveal very important paleo-environmental information (see Sections 18.2.2,18.3.2, and 18.3.3). Here we examine this filtration system at a physical level. This system was first understood by a great Danish geochemist named Willi Dansgaard (Dansgaard, 1964). 

In the other areas, generally, the host rocks weakly suffered regional and contact metamorphisms but suffered ocean-floor hydrothermal alteration. For example, hydrothermal alteration mineral assemblages in the Minamidani mine district in the Maizuru range from prehnite-pumpellyite facies to a transition state from green schist to amphibolite... 

Ozawa, K., Kawahata, H. and Nakanishi, M. (1990) Formation of ocean floor and spreading rate. Kagaku (Science), 60, 661-669 (in Japane.se). 

Boron concentrations and isotopes are also useful geochemical tracers of contamination in MORB. Boron concentrations are low (<2 ppm) in unaltered ocean floor basalt but high in altered basalts (>8 ppm B) (Spivack and Edmond 1987 Ryan and Langmuir 1993). Goldstein et al. (1989) measured B concentrations in their samples and found them to be less than 1.6 ppm, inconsistent with contamination. More recently, B isotopes have been used to assess contamination since large differences in 5 B are known to exist between seawater, sediments, and unaltered MORB. Sims et al. (2002) reported that 6 B for their 9°N EPR samples were inconsistent with incorporation of any seawater or seawater-derived material. 

By far the most important ores of iron come from Precambrian banded iron formations (BIF), which are essentially chemical sediments of alternating siliceous and iron-rich bands. The most notable occurrences are those at Hamersley in Australia, Lake Superior in USA and Canada, Transvaal in South Africa, and Bihar and Karnataka in India. The important manganese deposits of the world are associated with sedimentary deposits the manganese nodules on the ocean floor are also chemically precipitated from solutions. Phosphorites, the main source of phosphates, are special types of sedimentary deposits formed under marine conditions. Bedded iron sulfide deposits are formed by sulfate reducing bacteria in sedimentary environments. Similarly uranium-vanadium in sandstone-type uranium deposits and stratiform lead and zinc concentrations associated with carbonate rocks owe their origin to syngenetic chemical precipitation. 

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