Over four days, Brennan Phillips’ expedition team boated closer and closer to Kavachi, an underwater volcano off the Solomon Islands. They had not expected that the water would be devoid of life but they had also not expected to find sharks and other large marine species hanging out in hot acidic water. Caught in their footage were hammerheads and silky sharks, seemingly undisturbed by the water’s acidity and hot temperature. “It is so black and white when you see a human being not able to get anywhere near where these sharks are able to go”. “The deeper you go, the stranger it gets”, ocean engineer Brennan Phillips said in a statement.
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A shark is spotted swimming in the underwater volcano near Solomon Islands.
The volcano wasn’t erupting when Phillips’ team arrived, meaning it was safe to drop an 80-pound camera into the water to take a look around.
Their mission was to make a map of Kavachi’s peak, to learn as much as they could about it. Kavachi is an active volcano, but “nobody actually knows how often Kavachi erupts”, said Phillips in an article published on the National Geographic website. And then we see some snappers and some small fish … and then sharks start coming after the camera.
Even though Kavachi wasn’t erupting at the time, the team still saw bubbles of carbon dioxide and methane rising from seafloor vents, notes National Geographic’s Carolyn Barnwell.
To avoid that risk, Phillips and his colleagues sent down submersible robots with underwater cameras to explore Kavachi’s inhospitable environment. The discovery raises questions about what extreme environments the sharks can endure and how, the scientists say. “Do they have some sign that it’s about to erupt? Are there only certain animals that can withstand it?”
Footage of the sharks was captured using the National Geographic Society’s deep-sea Drop-Cam. They had approached the volcano with some trepidation because it is an active volcano with frequent surges in activity, according to Phillips.
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“They’re in there, in numbers, inside the volcano!”
