A year ago, the eruption of the Tonga volcano in the South Pacific made many people see the terrible power of the volcano when it was angry. Wherever the lava from the volcano erupted, no grass grew, and the volcanic ash made the world dark, and the huge shock wave threatened the safety of people’s lives and property.
However, in many news reports, it is not difficult to know that in addition to the surface volcanoes visible to the naked eye, there are also a large number of volcanoes under the sea, and the eruption of submarine volcanoes is the main cause of tsunamis and other disasters. Careful friends are about to ask, why do submarine volcanoes also erupt? Will the sea not quench the fire?
In fact, it is very simple to answer this question, because the friends who raised the above question made a basic logical error-they equated volcanoes with “erupting mountains”.
In fact, a volcano ≠ a fire-breathing mountain.
You must know that the “red flame” magma erupted by the volcano is actually not fire, but a high-temperature fluid, which is not essentially different from water, but completely different from fire.
Basically all substances have melting and boiling points, and the state of matter changes with temperature, as do hard rocks. Magma is rock in a molten state, mostly a mixture of solid-liquid-gas. Flame is a phenomenon in which combustibles release light, heat and chemical products during combustion. The main components are carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen, nitrogen and so on.
When a submarine volcano erupts, the magma enters the seawater, which is like pouring hot water into a cold water tank-cold water will cool the hot water, but it cannot make the hot water disappear like extinguishing a flame, unless we manually turn off the heat water tap.
Careful partners can always find blind spots—there is a problem, since a submarine volcano is like a faucet that constantly spouts hot water, and the cold sea water can cool the hot magma into rocks. So, can a huge amount of seawater be used to solidify all the magma ejected from the submarine volcano, block the crater, and make the submarine volcano a complete “extinct volcano” that will never erupt?
The answer is no. Because volcanoes are not weak boiling kettles with limited energy, they are the product of planetary-level heat and material circulation. As long as the earth is not destroyed and the crustal movement continues, volcanoes will continue to be active and endless.
