Underwater Volcanoes: the Ring of Fire | Indonesia Expedition

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:23]Oh, this is amazing gooey.

[00:00:35]Total of Indonesia is ocean.

[00:00:39]Yet, we don't know much of these oceans.

[00:00:45]Having an opportunity like this to explore the underexplored areas, the areas where nobody has ever touched, it's enlightening.

[00:00:58]>> Ocean Explorer has arrived in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where colliding tectonic plates and abundant volcanic activity are still actively shaping our planet.

[00:01:08]>> The Pacific Ring of Fire is a chain of volcano that stretch across Indonesia, Philippine, Japan, Alaska, and Western America. Created by a tectonic plate movement called subduction, [music] where one plate sinks under the other.

[00:01:25]>> The process of subduction doesn't just [music] reshape the seafloor, it builds islands, lifting mountains from the ocean's depths to the surface. [music] >> Not all the mountains are above the water.

[00:01:37]Some of them are submerged.

[00:01:39]They part of the same system. And those relationship can tell you much about the story of the earth.

[00:01:47]>> Dr. Maureen Frederick is the geoscience lead on the mission.

[00:01:50]>> Sulawesi is part of that Ring of Fire.

[00:01:53]I am from North Sulawesi and uh being able to observe and uh learn from this area is very important to me.

[00:02:04]>> Sulawesi is interesting because this a triple junction. It means that it's not only subduction from one plate to another, but there is another one that joining just like busy traffic. That create havoc in the middle of Indonesia.

[00:02:22]>> It's critical that scientists understand the immense forces at work here.

[00:02:29]Across this region, tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions have unleashed disasters on an extraordinary scale.

[00:02:37]Like the 2004 tsunami that claimed more than 200,000 lives.

[00:02:50]By exploring these waters, the team hopes to better understand the dynamics driving this volatile landscape. And it all starts with a map.

[00:02:59]>> We really hope to map the potential hazard sources that might occur to this area. Landslide or volcanic eruption underwater that might cause [music] tsunami.

[00:03:12]The responsibility or the task for the scientist is to actually try to understand what happened and hopefully predict what's going to happen.

[00:03:23]First of all, to understand anything, we need the base map.

[00:03:27]>> We are in day two for mapping uh bathymetry mapping.

[00:03:30]And we've got uh a lot of improvement from the old data.

[00:03:37]>> Dwi Pangestuti is in charge of analyzing the new high-resolution bathymetric data collected with Ocean Explorer's sonar.

[00:03:45]>> This data will contribute a lot to improve accuracy for the bathymetry national database.

[00:03:53]>> The updated map has revealed a previously unseen level of geological complexity on the seafloor in Sulawesi.

[00:04:01]>> We can see it's look like a connect between seamount A to seamount B. It's a like a chain [music] between uh the seamounts.

[00:04:11]We have very complex features in the Sulawesi Sea that I never expect before.

[00:04:20]There are seamounts we see, there are uh sea channel [music] that we never see before. And then we can see also from that morphology in the history of the the dynamic geological process, how the seafloor created.

[00:04:37]>> The formations on the upper crust creates a pathway for a magmatic fluid or an hydrothermal fluid coming from the deep down of the crust going up to the surface. Looking at these products of magmatic activity will tell you about the interaction between deformations and the formation of seamounts.

[00:04:58]>> By pairing the detailed seafloor mapping with samples collected from the seabed, the team begins to build a clearer picture of the forces at work here.

[00:05:06]>> [music] >> How they shape the marine environment and what they could mean for the people living nearby.

[00:05:13]>> We need a multi-disciplinary projects to understand these undersea features.

[00:05:20]Why it form and then how it form [music] and then how it affects life above it.

[00:05:26]>> On land, for a volcano after eruption, you know, there's nothing living in it.

[00:05:32]It takes some time to grow. It is the same in the ocean, too.

[00:05:36]>> The processes that occurs under the water that creates a world of its own.

[00:05:43]>> We need the map, the biology samples and the non-biology samples.

[00:05:55]What we can do is interpret what happened already.

[00:05:59]For predicting what may happen in the future, >> getting a geological informations from areas where it looked impossible without this technology. That to me is the most exciting part. Means that we can put our hands on what hasn't [music] been accessed before.

[00:06:24]>> The goal is a safe ocean. That doesn't mean no tsunami, no earthquake, no eruption, but it means that we understand better.