9400326 Johnson This Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) project will undertake the design, testing, and construction of a prototype instrument for the measurement of bare rock heat flow. The effort involves building a full-scale temperature sensor array and deployment bag which will be tested on the Juan de Fuca Ridge in 1994. The effort will be enhanced by the development of a new, state-of-the-art data logger, by the Japanese Ridge-Flux group. The proposal responds to a short-term opportunity to study an area of recent undersea volcanic activity using new technology on a previously attempted technique. Present models of the cooling of oceanic crust suggest that the convection of hydrothermal fluid within the upper crustal rocks is the primary process of heat transfer from the mantle to the overlying seawater. This instrument development effort address a scientific deficiency in the determination of the energy budget of the ocean crust - namely the present inability to measure heat flow where there is no sediment cover.
