Seamount named in honor of Earth Sciences professor Jasper Konter
Jasper Konter, next to rock dredge, on a sampling expedition targeting submarine hotspot volcanoes. Credit: Valerie Finlayson, UHM/ SOEST.
A large seamount southeast of Hawai‘i has been named Konter Ridge (0N, 135W) in honor of Jasper Konter (1977-2022), who was a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). He is recognized globally for his research on oceanic volcanism and isotope geochemistry.
“This is a beautiful tribute and an especially fitting way to honor Jasper and his love for marine geology,” said Bridget Smith-Konter, SOEST Earth Sciences professor and Konter’s wife. “He loved sea-going research and nearly all of his research studies were focused on investigating the origins of seamounts, their geochemical fingerprints, and how these relate to tectonic plate motions and mantle plumes.”
Konter’s research was focused on understanding how long-lived, plume-fed Pacific hotspots generate age-progressive volcanic chains, such as the Hawaiian Islands and Samoan Islands, over 100-million-year timescales. His unique scientific contributions include using evidence from isotope geochemistry and mantle seismology to confirm the deep origin of mantle plumes, and to show that materials that were once subducted in the geologic past are returned again to the surface by these rising mantle plumes.
Through his research on the different stages of intraplate volcanism, Konter advanced scientific understanding of the evolving source materials and magma production mechanisms as volcanoes age. He and collaborators also used a combination of isotope geochemistry, lava rock ages, and volcano locations to identify motions of the Pacific Plate relative to plume-fed hotspots, as well as the motions of mantle plumes relative to each other. Konter and colleagues also developed methods for using non-traditional iron isotopes to identify source materials contributing to magma genesis at oceanic volcanoes.
Surveying Konter Ridge
Konter Ridge is an 89 km-long chain of seamounts on the ocean floor, straddling a zone across the equatorial Pacific about 35 km wide. At its tallest point, it stands 3 km above the surrounding seafloor, lying almost 1.5 km below the ocean surface. Thus far, Konter Ridge has been surveyed only 3 times by multibeam sonar expeditions: the first survey in March 1987 was aboard the R/V Thomas Washington; the second survey in 2009 was a transit of the R/V Knorr; and the third survey was in January 2024 aboard the UH vessel R/V Kilo Moana, where David Sandwell, Jake Perez, and Captain David Martin first proposed this name to honor their friend and colleague.
Two days before what would have been Konter’s 47th birthday, Sandwell, a close colleague and friend of Konter and Smith-Konter; Perez, a dear friend of the couple; and Captain Martin, reached out to Smith-Konter and SOEST Dean Chip Fletcher, while at sea, to share their proposal.
“I was touched by their idea and intention to honor Jasper,” added Smith-Konter. “And I was captivated by its triangulated location amongst three of Jasper’s favorite places to study seamount evolution (each about 3500 km to Konter Ridge): Hawai’i, Jasper Seamount located near the Baja Peninsula [no relation to Konter], and Savai’i (Samoa). This effort, by our friends, to seek the official name of Konter Ridge for a massive, largely unexplored volcanic feature on the ocean floor, also carries a lot of sentimental value. It symbolizes friendship, collegiality, and the unique spirit of scientific curiosity and exploration.”
“We were thrilled to map a large seamount exactly on the equator to honor Jasper’s friendship and contributions to seafloor tectonics. During the survey, King Neptune hopped aboard the Kilo Moana for an equator crossing ceremony and a time to remember Jasper,” said Sandwell, in reference to a sailing tradition when a ship crosses the equator wherein those aboard who have not crossed previously are initiated by King Neptune and his court, portrayed by equator crossing veterans.
Honoring Konter’s adventurous spirit, curiosity, wisdom
“I’ve never forgotten his good humor (and equally matched intuition) when we were out at sea in 2013 (my first research expedition),” said Val Finlayson, former graduate student of Konter’s. “It was relatively early in the cruise and we had just brought a bunch of freshly-dredged rocks into the lab after cutting them open. Jasper walked up, looked at the rocks and announced, “Looks like HIMU!” and walked off. (And yes, after sophisticated testing, they later turned out to be HIMU!)”
“Jasper had a real taste for adventure,” said Matt Jackson, a friend and colleague of Jasper. “He was also a major skeptic of a lot of prior work done in ocean island geology and geochemistry, and I think this really motivated a lot of his work. But his intuition was almost always right.”
Fifteen years ago, Konter and Jackson had a two-day trek deep into the jungle in Savai’i, Samoa, to ground truth geology maps of the island made back in the 1950s.
“Jasper didn’t really believe the maps, which showed some unusually old rocks outcropping in the island’s interior,” said Jackson. “So we asked a local Samoan chief to guide us into the jungle. It was a real ‘Indiana Jones’ experience. The chief and his three sons guided us into the jungle, built a shelter, and then went foraging for food. We went looking for rocks. It was one of the most physically challenging things I’ve ever done, and we both had to go to a local medical clinic for treatment when we emerged from the jungle.”
But it was worth it, according to Jackson. “Jasper’s intuition and motivation to verify the maps helped us to better constrain the island’s volcanic stratigraphy.” This work has since inspired a plan to drill Savai’i to 2.5 km–to more fully constrain the island’s volcanic evolution–and it all traces back directly to Jasper’s adventurous spirit and approach to science. “I sure wish I could be working on this second chapter in the volcanic history of Savai’i with Jasper. He had an extraordinarily broad view of science across geophysics and geochemistry, and it was so much fun to work with him.”
“From his earliest days as a graduate student, Jasper traveled to Pacific seamounts to collect seamount samples so he could unlock the secrets of their origin and what that all means for our understanding of Earth as a dynamic geological and geochemical system,” said Hubert Staudigel, research geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Konter’s PhD advisor. “He started this quest as a graduate student. He led an expedition to Jasper Seamount off Baja California (that only coincidentally carried his first name, named after Jasper the semi-precious stone). Subsequently, his seagoing travel took him from his home base to many other Pacific Seamounts, some of them all the way into the South-West Pacific. It is more than fitting for him to have a significant seamount in the Pacific named after him.”
Rock samples from Konter Ridge have yet to be recovered, but colleagues are eager to someday understand the origin, age, and geochemistry of this mysterious seafloor feature.
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