Undersea eruption
By Carrie Lock

This is no Dante’s Peak.

There are movies, and then there are IMAX movies. The 65-foot by 85-foot screen is the size of 4,500 television sets, and the 44 surrounding speakers pump out 12,000 watts of power. It makes watching regular movies about as thrilling as watching QVC on television. IMAX is extreme entertainment.

Volcanoes of the Deep Sea is typical IMAX fare, stunning images and heavy on the science. For those who love NOVA and Bill Nye (the Science Guy), this combo is like a Porterhouse steak after the Big Mac of most Hollywood movies. And for those who think education and entertainment are mutually exclusive, well, did I mention the stunning images? You won’t even realize you’re learning something, I promise.

The film opens with a voiceover by geologist Peter Roma, describing his honeymoon in Spain. There, he says, fifty years ago, he stumbled across a fossil that no one had ever seen before. It looked like a round stamp of a honeycomb, the hexagonal cells permanently etched in stone. Neither Roma nor any other scientist could figure out what creature could have possibly left this imprint.

Enter ALVIN, the underwater submersible vehicle used for decades to explore the open seas, and star of last year’s IMAX Titanic exploration story, Ghosts of the Abyss. Through its electronic eyes, we are taken on a voyage to alien regions where sunlight never penetrates. In the inky black South Pacific, over 8500 feet below sea level off the coast of the Galapagos Islands, elaborate underwater chimneys spew forth thick gray pillars of smoke like a burning oil field, and red worms thrive on the poisonous hydrogen sulfide spewing out of the volcanoes. We see the bottom of the sea floor near the mid-Atlantic ridge--not bland mud, sand, or silt, but bulbous dark worms of cracked lava slithering their way across the Earth’s crust. We even go on a computer-generated tour of how our sun, solar system, and planet formed, focusing on the roiling chaos of the furnace sitting at Earth’s core.