There may be no harsher place for Earth life to survive--and no more difficult place to study it--than the sea floor vents called black smokers.
Crushing pressures, brutally hot water and corrosive gases sharply limit the time researchers can spend on site, even in deep-ocean submersibles, and corrode most sensors left behind.
But researchers brave those conditions to study the 300 or more bizarre species found at these light-less depths because many experts now believe that this is where life originated on Earth. Equally important, if there is life elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Jupiter's moon Europa, it may very well be found in similar venues.
These exotic creatures may therefore not only provide new insights into our own origins, but may also show biologists what kinds of life to seek in the far reaches of our solar system.
Their study was made a little easier this summer when a team from the University of Washington and the American Museum of Natural History recovered the rock chimneys from four black smokers off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The unprecedented recovery of these volcano-like accumulations of minerals will allow researchers to document the distribution of life throughout the chimney structure and collect bacteria from each microenvironment.
Using two ships and a remotely operated submersible, the team "surgically removed" 3,000 pounds of fragile rock from the ocean floor at the edge of the Juan de Fuca plate and lifted the four chimneys more than 7,500 feet to containers.
"That's quite an engineering feat," said biologist Craig Cary of the University of Delaware. "I applaud them."
Back in their laboratories, geologists have already made surprising discoveries about how the chimneys grow and what they are made of. And biologists in the group have begun growing bacteria scraped from the chimneys that may be among the most primitive forms of life known.
"The important thing . . . is that we raised something alive and hot," said earth scientist Edmond A. Mathez of the museum. "We can now study something about the maximum conditions at which life can exist."
The vents, discovered two decades ago, are found at the edges of the planet's massive tectonic plates, where molten magma lies just below the surface. Seawater seeps underground through cracks in the ocean floor and is heated to tremendous temperatures. The hot water dissolves rock and absorbs volcanic gases such as hydrogen sulfide.
