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Atlantis II Temperature Experiment
One of the two most compelling geological mysteries of the hydrothermal vent environment is heat flux. Eighty-five percent of the heat generated under and transferred through a vent area is unaccounted for. Only fifteen percent of the heat produced by plate interactions diffuses into the seawater from the black smokers, with the rest being lost to convection. Yet despite evidence that heat flux in the ridge environment is dominated by convection, it is still unknown exactly how thermal energy moves from under the seafloor to its diffusion in the seawater.
According to Dr. Stan Hart, the ideal manner for studying this phenomenon is an array of thousands of heat sensors spread across square kilometers of area. Unfortunately, the cost of producing such a vast number of sensors is highly prohibitive, and their maintenance would consume the full vehicular resources of our undersea habitat. A compromise, then, is a smaller array of sensors that could be left to gather a constant stream of temperature data and occasionally moved so that a more complete, although not perfect, temperature data set could be produced.
The geologists on-board Atlantis II should be able to create several temperature maps of the area nearby the sensor array, and using this data they should be able to confirm current theories of many small vents each radiating much smaller and much lower- temperature quantities of water as compared to black smokers.
In addition, information from the chemical identity probes on board each sensor should give a relatively comprehensive data set about exactly what chemicals emerge from each part of the seafloor, in what concentrations they are discharged, and where and how quickly they are diffused.