Hydrothermal Vents

[Mighty_Emperor]

The Lost City: Unique hydrothermal vents

A completely new find in the field and totally different to black smokers (which I love ):

Lost City a scientific gateway


04:38 PM CST on Sunday, March 7, 2004

By ALEXANDRA WITZE / The Dallas Morning News

SEATTLE – Surely fairies dance in the Lost City when no one is looking.

It is an otherworldly place. Rock pinnacles cluster in an eerie forest; ghostly spires tower as high as an 18-story building.

The fairies, though, would have to swim. Just like the lost city of Atlantis, this natural metropolis is drowned.

For thousands of years, the carbonate chimneys that make up the Lost City have lain submerged nearly half a mile beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Only now are scientists starting to plumb the city's secrets.
Facts about the Lost City

• Named for the lost city of Atlantis, because the vent field is on the Atlantis Massif and the discovery ship was the R/V Atlantis

• Measures 300 feet wide by 1,700 feet long

• Contains about 30 known tower structures, the largest of which (named Poseidon) is 180 feet tall

• Resembles carbonate chimneys found in a fjord in Greenland, the only other place known on Earth with similar underwater formations



RESOURCES

For more on last year's expedition to the Lost City, visit http://www.lostcity.washington.edu

SOURCE: University of Washington


Researchers explored the Lost City on a series of recent submersible dives, searching for clues to why it's unlike any other hot-spring system known on the sea floor.

"It's one of the most amazing places," says Deborah Kelley, an oceanographer who, in 2000, became one of the first three people ever to visit the Lost City.

And because her team stumbled onto the discovery serendipitously, "it just shows," she says, "that within the next decade there will be major fundamental discoveries in the ocean very different from anything we've seen before."

Lost City is completely different from the 200-plus other "hydrothermal vents" known elsewhere on the sea floor. At those spots, volcanically heated water squirts out of the sea floor to mix with cold seawater, precipitating out mineral particles in dramatic plumes of black "smoke." An astounding variety of giant tubeworms, clams and other creatures call these vents home.

Scientists had thought the black smoker vents were the only kind out there.

"The Lost City field has fundamentally changed our views on that," Dr. Kelley said last month in Seattle at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Instead of spewing out hot black smoke, the rock pinnacles at Lost City gently burble clear, lukewarm fluids. Instead of huge crabs clambering around, the Lost City is home to just a few types of microbes, along with some small shrimp and mussels. And instead of being incredibly acidic, the Lost City teeters to the opposite end of the pH scale, clocking in as alkaline as Drano.

The difference, scientists have found, comes from the geologic setting for each vent system.

Traditional hydrothermal vents lie atop underwater ridges where the Earth's thin crustal layer is pulling apart, with fresh magma welling from below to create newborn rock. The powerful heat of this never-ending process fuels the black smoker environments.

But Lost City couldn't be fueled by a volcano, since it's nine miles from the closest volcanic ridge, says Dr. Kelley. Instead, the vent field sits atop a separate 17,000-foot mountain – sort of an underwater Mount Rainier.

The mountain, called the Atlantis Massif, is made mainly of a type of rock called peridotite, which is similar to the rocks that exist deeper in the planet, beneath its crustal layer. Over eons, the activity of geologic faults has raised the peridotite rocks to the bottom of the sea floor, exposing them to seawater.

Where peridotite and water meet, chemistry begins, says David Butterfield, also of the University of Washington.

Chemical reactions suck up water and turn peridotite into serpentine, a dark-green rock flecked with white that is sometimes used as a decorative building stone. In the process, the rock expands, swelling as much as 40 percent – and even making the mountain of the Atlantis Massif.

More important, the chemical reactions also give off a tremendous amount of heat. Theoretically, the rock temperature could soar by more than 500 degrees Fahrenheit, says Dr. Kelley. The heat provides an energy source for fluids percolating out of the rock, which upon hitting seawater precipitate out chimneys made of carbonate, the same stuff found in cave formations.

Instead of being directly fueled by a volcano, the Lost City draws its energy from chemical reactions taking place on the sea floor, Dr. Kelley says.

At the same time, the rocks give off hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide and methane, providing a raw energy source for bacteria and other sea life. That process could be similar to what took place on the early Earth, when there were lots of rocks like peridotites and lots of seawater for them to react with. So the Lost City could serve as a proxy for understanding what some of Earth's early ecosystems looked like, Dr. Kelley says.

To investigate further, her research team returned to the site last spring, in only their second trip there since discovering the field in 2000.

Over the course of a month, the scientists dived to the sea floor in the submersible Alvin as well as deploying the robotic ABE, an "autonomous benthic explorer" that flew itself in a regular pattern over the Lost City, generating a detailed map of the area.

On each dive, two scientists and an Alvin pilot sank through 2,300 feet of dark ocean until the ghostly towers of the Lost City came into view. The pilot deftly maneuvered Alvin around the giant chimneys, careful not to get pushed to the side by powerful currents or to slam against overhanging ledges.

"It's like you're flying around in a submarine," says Dr. Butterfield. Many times Alvin reached out its robotic arm, plucking a piece of rock or taking a water sample to be carried back to the surface.

Dr. Kelley compared the experience to exploring an unknown mountain range at night – with three people crammed into a Volkswagen and only a flashlight for illumination.

Already, though, she's eager to return. The team is writing another proposal to visit the Lost City, although with Alvin's busy schedule the earliest they could go would be 2006.

In the meantime, other groups have also dived to the Lost City. Russian scientists have visited, and a French team is planning to go, Dr. Kelley said.

Movie director James Cameron has even taken an interest, sending a crew to film footage of the Lost City for the IMAX film Extreme Life, due to be released this fall.

But if things start to get crowded at the Lost City, there should be plenty of other places to expand into. Dr. Kelley thinks there may be many more such "cities" scattered around the ocean – perhaps one on almost every mountain like the Atlantis Massif.

Source

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

More reports:

New ecosystem at Atlantic hydrothermal vent

Friday, March 4, 2005 Posted: 1442 GMT (2242 HKT)


WASHINGTON (AP) -- A strange world of see-through shrimp, crabs and other life forms teems around a newly explored field of thermal vents near the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, scientists report.

Towering white mineral chimneys mark the field, named the Lost City, a sharp contrast to the better-known black smoker vents that have been studied in recent years.

The discovery shows "how little we know about the ocean," lead researcher Deborah S. Kelley of the University of Washington said.

"I have been working on black smokers for about 20 years, and you sort of think you have a good idea what's going on," she said in a telephone interview. "But the ocean is a big place and there are still important opportunities for discovery."

The Lost City was discovered by accident in 2000 as Kelley and others studied undersea areas near the mid-ocean ridge.

They returned to the area in 2003 to analyze what they had found and were startled to learn how different the new vent environment and its residents were from the ones studied before.

Their findings are reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Black smokers are chimney-like structures that form when very hot water -- reaching 700 degrees Fahrenheit (371.11 Celsius) -- breaks through the ocean floor and comes into contact with frigid ocean water. The minerals that crystallize during the process give the chimneys their black color.

At Lost City, on the other hand, the temperature of the escaping fluids is 150 degrees (65.56 Celsius) to 170 degrees (76.67 Celsius). The environment is extremely alkaline, compared to the high acid levels at black smokers.

A variety of unusual creatures have been discovered around black smoker vents, including tubeworms that can grow as long as eight feet.

At first the scientists thought there were few animals in Lost City. Then they vacuumed the surface of the white vents and found large numbers of tiny shrimp and crabs, mostly transparent or translucent and less than a half-inch in size, that had been hiding in nooks and crannies, Kelley said.

The total mass of life around the Lost City vents is less than at the black smokers but there is just as much variety, she added.

Microbes found in the chimneys at Lost City -- named for the research vessel Atlantis -- appear to live off large amounts of methane and hydrogen. There is little or no carbon dioxide, the key energy source for life at black-smoker vents.

There is also little hydrogen sulfide and only very low traces of metals, on which many of the microbes at the black smokers depend.

The report offers the first detailed portrayal of a new type of ecosystem that may be widespread, said Antje Boetius of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany.

Boetius, who was not part of the research team, said in a commentary on the paper that the amount of living organisms found inside the chimneys at the city was astonishing.

While the black smokers, first discovered in 1979, form at volcanic areas along the oceanic ridges, the Lost City formation was found about nine miles (5.4 kilometers) to the side of the ridge. The formation is at latitude 30 degrees north, roughly the same as that of Jacksonville, Florida.

Also participating in the study were researchers from Duke University; ETH-Zentrum in Zurich, Switzerland; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

----------------------
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

Source
Link is dead. The MIA webpage (quoted in full above) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2005031....cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/03/04/lostcity.ap/

Friday, March 4, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.

Scientists from UW report on undersea "Lost City"

By Sandi Doughton

Seattle Times staff reporter


When scientists on a research cruise in the Atlantic Ocean first stumbled across an underwater landscape of giant white towers and feathery spires, they only had time for a quick look around.

"We got just the teeniest glimpse," said University of Washington oceanographer Deborah Kelley, who led that voyage in 2000. Excited by the discovery of what looked like a new type of hydrothermal vent field, she organized a monthlong return trip three years later to the "Lost City," named for the mythical world of Atlantis.

In today's issue of the journal Science, Kelley and her colleagues report the results from that expedition, including the surprising find that the geysers are populated by more than 65 types of tiny creatures, including transparent worms, water fleas and mats of bacteria that waft in the currents like kelp. The animals and microbes thrive in scalding hot fluids nearly as caustic as Drano. Many seem to subsist on a "diet" of natural gas and hydrogen.

"It really changes our ideas about where life can live on this planet," Kelley said. "And it really drives home that there's still a huge amount yet to be discovered in the oceans."

The scientists believe the undersea vents could mimic conditions on the primordial earth when life first formed, and may provide some of the best insights into that process.

The hope is to find living fossils that "tell us something about what the earliest organisms were like," said UW microbiologist John Baross, who is trying to grow some of the microbes collected on the voyage in his Seattle laboratory.

Though no one has ever seen anything like the Lost City before, there are almost certainly many sites like it, Kelley said.

"There are probably much larger areas of the sea floor that host hydrothermal vent systems and all of these new types of organisms — and to date we know almost nothing about them," she said.

Scientists have been studying hot springs on the sea floor since the late 1970s, when they first discovered an astounding array of giant tube worms, clams and swarms of shrimp living in and around volcanic vents called "black smokers." Some of the best-known "smokers" lie in the Pacific off the Washington coast.

But the Lost City is a very different type of environment, Kelley and her team found.

All of the hydrothermal fields discovered previously are along rifts on the ocean floor where molten rock flows to the surface. That lava heats the fluids in black smokers to a searing 700 degrees and creates a brew rich in metals, acids and carbon dioxide, which nourishes the microorganisms that form the basis of a unique food chain.

In contrast, the Lost City is perched on a plateau on the Atlantis massif — an underwater mountain the size of Mount Rainier, located in the mid-Atlantic miles from the nearest volcanic rift.

The heat that drives the system comes from a chemical reaction between sea water and ancient oceanic bedrock. Temperatures are a milder 100 to 200 degrees. When the hot water bubbles up and hits the icy sea, dissolved carbonate minerals precipitate out, forming white and gray towers that rise like giant limestone stalagmites.

Unlike at black smokers, the chemistry at Lost City is dominated by methane, or natural gas, and hydrogen. The dominant type of microorganisms belong to a group called Archaea, bacterialike bugs, some of which are known to metabolize methane, Baross said.

The monolithic chimneys at the Lost City are also taller than most black smokers. One 18-story behemoth the scientists nicknamed Poseidon would tower above the Interstate 5 bridge over Portage Bay, Kelley said.

Another researcher whimsically described the site as "a conglomeration of colossal beehives from outer space." Director James Cameron was so taken with the eerie scene he featured it in his IMAX film, "Aliens of the Deep."

"If it was on land, it would probably be a national park," said David Butterfield, a geochemist from the University of Washington who participated in the 2003 voyage along with researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other universities.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the scientists used the deep-sea submersible Alvin for their explorations. They made 19 dives, each lasting about eight hours, Kelley said. That includes the 25 minutes it took each morning just to submerge to the site, about half a mile below the surface.

Once they arrived, the scientists maneuvered around the spires with only the sub's headlights to show the way.

"You're essentially flying around in this deep blackness, moving up and down these very tall structures," Butterfield said. "If the currents aren't too bad and you can actually get the submarine to sit still long enough, you hover there and put out a hose to collect water samples."

The team also used Alvin's robotic arms to break off sections of the columns and scoop up some living organisms, including one large crab.

During the first visit to the site five years ago, it looked devoid of animal life, Kelley said.

But during the return trip, when the scientists ran a vacuum attachment over the columns, they discovered a wide range of snails, worms and tiny crustaceans in the nooks and crannies.

While living creatures are not as plentiful as at the black smokers, the diversity of species is comparable.

After devoting their daylight hours to the Alvin dives, at night the research team launched a remotely operated vessel that cruised through the depths, mapping the site with radar.

Robotic vessels will be the centerpiece of a third expedition this summer. The probes will film the hydrothermal field and its inhabitants and collect samples. Data will be transmitted instantaneously to Kelley in Seattle, and to aquariums, museums and classrooms across the country.

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Information

"Lost City" expedition: www.lostcity.washington.edu

View a video: www.uwnews.org

-----------------------
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Source: seattletimes.com/nation-world//2002196507_lostcity04m.html?mbaseid=2002196507
Link is dead. No archived version found.

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Emerging Ocean Volcano Has ‘Moat of Death’

By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 April 2006
08:41 am ET


An undersea volcano in the Pacific is growing from its summit and could breach the ocean surface within a few decades, a new study reveals.

In the meantime, it is creating a thriving environment for some sea creatures but a death trap for others.

Researchers used submersible vehicles and other technology to explore Vailulu'u Seamount, an active volcano lying off the coast of the Samoan archipelago. They found that the volcano had sprouted a new 1,000-foot cone at its summit since it was last explored 5 year ago.

Toothpaste and pillows

Dubbed Nafanua, the cone is made from large pillow lava, a type of rock that forms when hot magma spewed by underwater volcanoes or cracks in the Earth comes into contact with water and congeals into large blobs, or "pillows."

"Imagine a replica volcano on your tabletop and somebody squirting toothpaste out from underneath," said study team member Hubert Staudigel from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

"If you keep squirting toothpaste from this one place, the squirts will overlie one another. Depending on their viscosity, the squirts will have a very flat slope or just stay in place and pile on top of each other," Staudigel told LiveScience.

Moat of death

Nafanua, which is still about 2,300 feet below sea level, is creating new niches for undersea creatures as it creeps slowly towards the ocean surface. Near its summit, eels swarm around warm hydrothermal vents and feed on shrimp carried their way by volcanic currents.

The inside of the Nafanua, however, is deadly. The same currents that provide the eels with food also deposit sea creatures into a cavity of turbid and toxic waters, creating what the researchers call a "moat of death." The bodies of fish, squid and crustaceans rot within this moat and bright red bristle worms feed on the bacteria that slough off their carcasses.

The finding was detailed in this week's issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/0604 ... lcano.html

 

[crunchy5]

Thats why I love this site , fantastic posts about a subject I knew nowt about, super links from the first bit but I couldnt find the video off the march 4th 05 post, never mind, I wonder what they're up to on the lost city project ?

 

[ramonmercado]

Strange creatures lurking on floor of Atlantic may hold clues to origin of life
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ire ... 73609.html
LORNA SIGGINS and MICHELLE McDONAGH

Fri, Aug 05, 2011

CLUES AS to how life began on the planet may be gleaned from the volcanic vent system which Irish and British scientists have discovered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Several unusual species, including a blind shrimp with an infrared “third eye”, were identified on the deep-sea mineral-rich volcanic field some 1,500km off the Irish coast.

This shrimp has been located on other vent systems, but biologists will analyse data to see if hitherto unidentified animals can be confirmed, expedition leader Dr Andy Wheeler of University College Cork, said yesterday.

The new biogeographical area, well outside Irish waters, has been named “Moytirra”, or “plain of the pillars”, after a battlefield in Irish mythology. It is the first such hydrothermal system to be identified between the Azores and Iceland, lying on the mid-Atlantic ridge where Europe separates from the Americas.

The largest of its volcanic chimneys, towering over 10m at the foot of a cliff, has been named “Balor” after the legendary Irish giant, according to Patrick Collins from NUI Galway’s Ryan Institute, who led Ireland’s marine biological team on board.

Mr Collins will be working with Jon Copley of the University of Southampton to catalogue and characterise creatures among a “riot of life”, as Mr Copley describes it, in an “unlikely haven on the ocean floor”. The first indication of this system on the mid-Atlantic ridge was detected by British scientists with the national oceanography centre at University of Southampton three years ago.

Hydrothermal vents are fissures or cracks in the earth’s surface, funnelling enormous volumes of boiling sea water enriched with minerals from volcanic sources through chimneys or “black smokers”. The complex communities they support thrive on chemosynthesis, totally independent of sunlight.

The first such vents were discovered in the eastern Pacific about 30 years ago, and some 500 new faunal species have been recorded in six biogeographical provinces charted to date.

Scientists from Southampton teamed up with researchers at UCC, NUIG, and the Geological Survey of Ireland to find out more, and left Galway last month on the State research ship, Celtic Explorer, with the support of the Marine Institute and the National Geographic Society.

Dr Wheeler said that the team found the edge of the vent field some 3,000m below, using the ship’s remotely operated vehicle, within only two hours of arriving at the location.

Such was the heat of the chimneys’ water, at 350 degrees, that scientists had to use titanium syringes to extract samples.

“These animals are living in a harsh, toxic, acidic environment full of heavy metals – a place that would usually kills other organisms so the enzymes generated in their bodies may have potential for medical research. The discovery could also be very important for Ireland’s hydrothermal mining industry,” Dr Wheeler said.

Dr Bramley Murton of the British oceanography centre, who led the mineralisation study on the expedition, said the unique environment was one where “geology and biology have come together to form something as close to extraterrestrial life as we get on this planet”. National Geographic filmed the work for inclusion in its Alien Deep series, due to be broadcast in 2012.

Speaking on the Celtic Explorer yesterday, Minister for the Marine Simon Coveney paid tribute to all involved. Among the team on board was geological survey geologist Maria Judge who last year piloted the remote controlled subsea vehicle on board the James Cook vessel which discovered the world’s deepest known hydrothermal vents on the Caribbean’s Cayman trough.

As part of this new project, secondary school students were invited to design their own deep sea creature. The winner may have one of the new species at the vents named after him or her.

 

[rynner2]

Deep-sea creatures at volcanic vent
By Rebecca Morelle, Science reporter, BBC News

Remarkable images of life from one of the most inhospitable spots in the ocean have been captured by scientists.
Researchers have been surveying volcanic underwater vents - sometimes called black smokers - in the South West Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean.
The UK team found an array of creatures living in the super-heated waters, including yeti crabs, scaly-foot snails and sea cucumbers.
They believe some of the species may be new to science.

Hydrothermal vents were first discovered in 1977. These fissures in the ocean floor spew out fiercely hot, mineral-rich water, yet somehow, diverse ecosystems are able to thrive in these hostile conditions.

The team, from the University of Southampton, was particularly interested in the vents on the South West Indian Ridge because this range is linked to the Mid Atlantic Ridge and the Central Indian Ridge, where vent life has been well documented.

This area is also unusual because it is an "ultra-slow spreading" ridge, which means it is less volcanically active than other ridges, with fewer vents that are further apart.

Prof Jon Copley, chief scientist of the Indian Ocean vents project, said: "This place is a real crossroads in terms of the vent species around the world."

Using a remote-operated, underwater robot called Kiel 6000, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM Geomar), in Germany, the team was able to train their cameras on the vents.
In the hottest habitat around the black smokers, they found snails and shrimp, as well as mussels, sea cucumbers and crabs. They then compared these with the animals found at vents on the neighbouring ridges.

Prof Copley said: "I was expecting there to be some similarities to what we know from the Atlantic, and some similarities to what we know from the Indian Ocean vents, and that was true, but we also found types of animals here which are not known from either of those neighbouring areas, and that was a big surprise.
"One was a type of yeti crab. There are two currently described species of yeti crab known from the Pacific, and it isn't like those, but it is the same type of animal, with long, hairy arms.
"Also some sea cucumbers - not known from the Atlantic or Central Indian vents, but known form the Pacific."
He added: "We've got links to lots of different parts of the world here, which is very exciting."

The team was also surprised at the diversity of life they found during this expedition, which was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc).
Prof Copley said: "In a lot of other vent fields I've been to, in this hot zone where you get the animals there is often just one type of animal living there: in the deep Mid Atlantic Ridge, it's the shrimp. But here, we have seen three to four all in the same zone."

The findings should help researchers to learn more about how life moves from vent to vent: vents are short lived, and without the ability to hop from one system to the next, life there would go extinct.
"That is why vents are a great place to understand how species disperse and evolve in the deep oceans, because they are like little islands," Prof Copley added.

Despite these findings, the researchers are worried about the future of this underwater terrain.
China has been granted an exploratory licence by the International Seabed Authority to explore the potential of mining the vents in this area for their rich minerals.

Prof Copley said: "This vent field is the size of a few football pitches, and it seems possible that it is the only known range of some of these species.
"It would be very premature to start disrupting it before we really know the true extent of what lives in it."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16267625

 

[ramonmercado]

More on Dr Wheeler and his team.

Irish scientists head into the deep and find a one-eyed shrimp
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ire ... 48759.html
DICK AHLSTROM, Science Editor

Mon, Apr 23, 2012

IRISH SCIENTISTS uncovered mini volcanoes, discovered a blind one-eyed shrimp and identified valuable natural resources while leading a deep-water expedition to the depths of the mid-Atlantic.

How they did this will be explained later this year in a National Geographic Society television programme called Alien Deep.

There is no need to wait for this to hear the story, however, as the expedition’s leader, Dr Andrew Wheeler of University College Cork, will deliver a free public talk on the subject tomorrow at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.

It is a story worth hearing, offering an insight into the alien world that lies in the ocean depths, three kilometres beneath the surface.

“It was an Irish/British expedition to discover a new volcanic vent system in the mid-Atlantic,” said Dr Wheeler.

He led the mission last August aboard the national research vessel RV Celtic Explorer, in a project involving UCC, the Geological Survey of Ireland, NUI Galway, the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre in the UK.

Funding came from the Marine Institute and the National Geographic Society.

Volcanic vents – so-called black smokers – occur at places on Earth where the crust is pulling apart. This is happening along the mid-Atlantic ridge where a split in the seabed runs from Iceland down to the Azores islands and into the south Atlantic.

Amazing things can happen along these splits, and none more amazing that these volcanic vents, Dr Wheeler said.

Seawater seeping into the seabed is heated as it passes through very hot rocks, picking up minerals and metal salts in the process.

It turns into high pressure steam which forces a way back up and blasts out of the seabed at places along the mid-Atlantic ridge.

It carries gold, zinc, copper, iron and other metals and minerals and these collect to form “chimneys” that can be tens of metres high, he said.

These sites tend to support unique marine life: bizarre deep-water species can live where the frigid waters have been heated.

The expedition was on the hunt for these vents, similar to the only ones known along the ridge near Iceland and off the Azores. The team sailed 1,400km from Ireland to reach the ridge.

“We had a suspicion there was a vent because we picked up a weak chemical signal in the water column,” Dr Wheeler said. “We followed the signal down to the seabed.”

They sent down a remotely operated vehicle, Holland 1, to search and discovered a vent system that is the size of a football pitch.

“We got some amazing video and samples from a black smoker,” he said.

And, as has been the case at vent sites around the world, they discovered a self-sustaining ecosystem of unusual species.

“We found a fauna similar to that at the Azores,” he said. “The question is, how did it get there given this new discovery is much deeper and colder?”

They recovered a blind shrimp living near the vents. Normal vision is of no value in the inky depths, but this had a new kind of eye, one evolved to “see” using infrared signals for temperature. “So it is evolving a new way of seeing. It is seeing by heat,” Dr Wheeler said.

Dr Wheeler’s talk, Alien Deep: Volcanoes and One-Eyed Shrimp off the Coast of Ireland, takes place at the Royal Irish Academy in Dawson Street, Dublin, at 6pm tomorrow. Admission is free but you must book. Register online at ria.ieor phone 01-676 2570. The following link connects to a UCC video describing the expedition: bit.ly/HP0JbG