Numerical simulation of cool hydrothermal processes in the upper volcanic crust beneath a marine sediment pond: North Pond, North Atlantic Ocean ...

• Main Authors: Price, Adam N., Fisher, Andrew T., Stauffer, Philip H., Gable, Carl W.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: Numerical Simulation; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7291/d1g67p; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.7291/D1G67P

Low temperature hydrothermal systems hosted in the volcanic oceanic crust are responsible for ~20% of Earth's global heat loss. Marine sediment ponds comprise an important type-setting on young ridge flanks where hydrothermal circulation advectively extracts lithospheric heat, but the nature of coupled fluid-heat transport in these settings remains poorly understood. Here we present coupled (fluid-heat) numerical simulations of ocean crustal hydrogeology in and below North Pond, a sediment pond on ~8 Ma seafloor of the North Atlantic Ocean. Two- and three-dimensional simulations show that advective transport beneath North Pond is complex and time-varying, with multiple spatial and temporal scales, consistent with seafloor and borehole observations. A unidirectional, single-pass flow system is neither favored nor needed to match the spatial distribution of seafloor heat flux through North Pond sediments. When the permeability of the crustal aquifer is relatively high (10-10 to 10-9 m2), simulations can ... : These data are input files for the numerical simulation code Finite Element Heat and Mass Transfer Code (FEHM; https://fehm.lanl.gov/). This dataset complements the publication titled "Numerical Simulation of Cool Hydrothermal Processes in the Upper Volcanic Crust Beneath a Marine Sediment Pond: North Pond, North Atlantic Ocean" published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The data here are model input files for the numerical code Finite Element Heat and Mass Transfer Code (FEHM) for the simulation of coupled fluxes of fluid and heat beneath the sedimented pond, North Pond in the North Atlantic Ocean. These files represent the characteristic simulation of permeability for each of the resulting aquifer thicknesses simulated 100, 300, 600, and 1000m. ...