Massive mountain almost as big as Oregon’s Mount Hood found in the ocean off Canada
A towering seamount that rivals Oregon’s Mount Hood has been found on the Pacific Ocean floor off British Columbia.
It stands at least 10,187 feet tall, with “at least” being a key phrase.
NOAA Ocean Exploration mapped the site May 8, and the research team “did not quite capture it all, so the seamount is likely a bit taller,” officials told McClatchy News.
By comparison, Mount Hood is 11,243 feet high and counts as the 13th tallest peak in the U.S., according to Peakbagger.com.
The discovery was announced in a May 9 Facebook post that noted old nautical charts indicated a 5,223-foot mount sat 400 miles off Canada.
Instead, the team found something almost twice that size, created by violent volcanic activity.
It towers like Godzilla over everything around it and an image created by “echosounder” technology shows the sides are steep and jagged. As for the peak, it shows no hint of being flat.
The base is about 13,123 feet below the surface, NOAA says.
How a coastal mountain that big went undiscovered is at the heart of an expedition that is using advanced technology aboard NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer to map the region’s seafloor. The expedition runs through May 27 and will focus on waters deeper than 656 feet, officials say.
“Alaskan waters cover just over 1 million square nautical miles, yet are the least mapped relative to the waters of any other U.S. state,” NOAA wrote in an expedition overview.
“The little seafloor mapping data that does exist for Alaskan waters is sparse and predates modern mapping technology. In particular, the deepwater habitats of the Aleutian Islands and Aleutian Trench ... remain predominantly unexplored.”
A bit of underwater archaeology is also planned, with “a limited number of dives” devoted to finding a World War II-era B-25 bomber that went down in the area with nine crew members in 1944. Those dives are in partnership with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and will employ side-scan sonar to locate the wreckage.
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