In addition to the great ridges and volcanic chains, the oceans conceal another form of undersea
mountains: the strange guyot, or flat-topped seamount. No marine geologist even suspected the
existence of these isolated mountains until they were discovered by geologist Harry H. Hess in 1946.
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He was serving at the time as a naval officer on a ship equipped with a fathometer. Hess named these
truncated peaks for the nineteenth-century Swiss-born geologist Arnold Guyot, who had served on
the faculty of Princeton University for thirty years. Since then, hundreds of guyots have been
discovered in every ocean but the Arctic. Like offshore canyons, guyots present a challenge to
oceanographic theory. They are believed to be extinct volcanoes. Their flat tops indicate that they
once stood above or just below the surface, where the action of waves leveled off their peaks. Yet
today, by definition, their summits are at least 600 feet below the surface, and some are as deep as
8,200 feet. Most lie between 3,200 feet and 6,500 feet. Their tops are not really flat but slope upward
to a low pinnacle at the center. Dredging from the tops of guyots has recovered basalt and coral
rubble, and that would be expected from the eroded tops of what were once islands. Some of this
material is over 80 million years old. Geologists think the drowning of guyots involved two processes:
The great weight of the volcanic mountains depressed the sea floor beneath them, and the level of the
sea rose a number of times, especially when the last Ice Age ended, some 8,000 to 11,000 years ago
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