In April 2006, Maya Tolstoy, a geophysicist at Columbia University, received some good news and some bad news during a research expedition at sea. The submarine volcano that she and her colleague Felix Waldhauser had been monitoring for years had recently erupted. This was exciting, because only a handful of other deep-sea eruptions have been detected (1), and it was the first time ocean-bottom seismometers were in place during such an event. However, two-thirds of the instruments were stuck in the new lava on the sea floor (see the figure). Would the remaining third yield the data needed to gain new insights into this fundamental but poorly understood geological process? In the end, the good news outweighed the bad. The instruments that were recovered provided some remarkable results, as Tolstoy et al. report on page 1920 of this issue (2). Also, this may only be the first installment in this story, because there is hope that more instruments can be rescued from the sea floor.
We need to put together an urgent top priority mission to recover those imstruments – quick, call Bruce Willis!
Perhaps, but Bruce Willis blew up the comet in Armageddon. So he probably wouldn’t be as delicate as would be required. We need Tommy Lee Jones from Volcano!