ASHES Vent Field (RS03ASHS)

The ASHES hydrothermal field is located near the base of the western caldera wall of Axial Seamount at a water depth of 1552 m. It hosts numerous active hydrothermal sulfide chimneys, myriad lower temperature diffuse flow sites, and abundant vent biota.

Site DOI and Citation Guidance

OOI assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) at the platform or site level. The DOI for the Axial Seamount ASHES Vent Field is 10.58046/OOI-RS03ASHS.

The minimum recommended citation for this site is:

NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative. (2014). Axial Seamount ASHES Vent Field, DOI: 10.58046/OOI-RS03ASHS.

This follows the format NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative. (Year Published). Site title, DOI: Site DOI, where Year Published is the year OOI data collection began at the site.

We encourage data users to incorporate full citations when referencing OOI data in order to support FAIR data principles and data traceability. OOI also provides further guidance on citations, including information on adding specific data products and data access points to citations.

Data Access

The following links provide data access via Data Explorer or other methods:

• Direct access to the data on this site and its subcomponents
• General access to OOI data using a variety of methods

Site Description

The ASHES hydrothermal field is located near the base of the western caldera wall of Axial Seamount at a water depth of 1552 m. It hosts numerous active hydrothermal sulfide chimneys, myriad lower temperature diffuse flow sites, and abundant vent biota. The focused study area is at the ~ 4 m tall actively venting sulfide chimney called “Mushroom” and a diffuse flow site adjacent to the base of the chimney. Instrumentation at this site is focused on understanding linkages between local and far-field seismic events on fluid chemistry and temperature, chimney evolution, and impacts on vent biota.

Seafloor instruments at the ASHES site are attached to a Medium-Power J-Box (MJ03B) through a series of extension cables. An ~ 4 km long extension cable from Primary Node PN03B provides the JBox with significant power (375 v) and bandwidth (1 Gbs) to operate the instruments and transmit data to shore. In addition to geophysical and temperature monitoring instrumentation attached the MJ03B JBox, the site also hosts a high definition video camera, linked to shore via a separate fiber optic cable that provides 10 Gb bandwidth from PN03B. This allows full resolution video to be transferred in real-time to shore, along with communications for pan and tilt capabilities, as well as lights.

Instruments

This site/platform includes the following instruments. To learn more about an instrument type, select the instrument class-series. To access relevant data streams for an instrument, the instrument code will take you to the OOI Data Portal.