A ets of holes in the seafloor.
While mapping the summit of an underwater volcano north of the Azores, an autonomous underwater rover recorded what seems to be a series of rectangular holes in the seafloor at a depth of 3,000 meters. The images were shared on the social media channel of the NOAA Ocean Exploration, with the comment that “the holes look human-made, but the little piles of sediment around them suggest they were excavated by…something.”
“We observed several of these sublinear sets of holes in the sediment. These holes have been previously reported from the region, but their origin remains a mystery.”
NOAA invited the public to come up with a possible solution to the mystery.
Explanations range from samples taken by a previous expedition, erosion by marine currents, or bubbles of gas escaping the seafloor.
Based on the observation that little piles of sand were noted near the holes, a burrowing organism seems to be the most likely explanation. However, as the region is of volcanic origin, it is also possible that the set of holes is formed by jets of water and gases escaping a tectonic fault.
The discovery was made as part of the Voyage to the Ridge 2022 expedition, which is exploring and mapping the deepwater areas of the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, a system of two parallel fracture zones displacing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Azores Plateau, an oceanic plateau formed about 20 million years ago by magmatic activity.
