The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle -- the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick -- is exposed on the sea floor.
Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an "open wound" on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution.
"We know so little about it," said Bramley Murton, a senior research scientist at Southampton's National Oceanography Centre.
"It's a real challenge to our established understanding of what the earth's surface looks like underneath the waves," he told Reuters by telephone from the brand new, hi-tech research ship RRS James Cook.
Scientists to investige hole of the Earth's crust under Atlantic Ocean
Posted on Saturday, March 10 2007 @ 10:01 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck