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Drilling into the Alpine Fault to measure the conditions of the fault and monitor what happens before a major earthquake, a team of New Zealand and international scientists found extremely hot water just a couple of hundred metres down.
The Westland Deep Fault Drilling Project — jointly led by Victoria University of Wellington, GNS Science and the University of Otago — drilled almost 900 m into the fault from a site in Whataroa near Franz Joseph. The team published a paper in Nature today about their surprising find of water hot enough to boil only 630 m down, with temperatures at the bottom of the borehole (around 820m) around 120˚C.
The San Andreas fault in California was drilled in a similar way, Professor Dave Craw from the University of Otago who was not involved in the study, told the Associated Press. But the “temperatures and thermal gradient encountered there were much lower than the Alpine Fault”, making the high temperatures unusual in a global context.
“We’d always thought it was going to be warmer than normal,” Professor John Townend told Radio NZ, because the Southern Alps are being lifted up rapidly (in geological timescales) by tectonic processes bringing up rocks from a great depth. “That process brings heat up from the portions of the crust and concentrates it in the shallow subsurface. Then the rainwater that falls on the West Coast seeps into the hot rocks and mines all that heat.”
Read more here. (Science Media Centre)
The Westland Deep Fault Drilling Project — jointly led by Victoria University of Wellington, GNS Science and the University of Otago — drilled almost 900 m into the fault from a site in Whataroa near Franz Joseph. The team published a paper in Nature today about their surprising find of water hot enough to boil only 630 m down, with temperatures at the bottom of the borehole (around 820m) around 120˚C.
The San Andreas fault in California was drilled in a similar way, Professor Dave Craw from the University of Otago who was not involved in the study, told the Associated Press. But the “temperatures and thermal gradient encountered there were much lower than the Alpine Fault”, making the high temperatures unusual in a global context.
“We’d always thought it was going to be warmer than normal,” Professor John Townend told Radio NZ, because the Southern Alps are being lifted up rapidly (in geological timescales) by tectonic processes bringing up rocks from a great depth. “That process brings heat up from the portions of the crust and concentrates it in the shallow subsurface. Then the rainwater that falls on the West Coast seeps into the hot rocks and mines all that heat.”
Read more here. (Science Media Centre)
