Deepest Ocean Vents Swarm With Heat-Vision Shrimp? by Dave Mosher

                                                    Image courtesy University of Southampton/NOC

Far beneath the Caribbean Sea (map), at the world's deepest volcanic ocean vents, robotic vehicles have helped find a new species of shrimp (pictured) that may have Superman-style heat vision.

Though the vent field and a sister site nearby were found in spring 2010, details and pictures of new species at the site were released just yesterday.

Located near the Cayman Islands, the hot seafloor vents are nearly 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) deep—about 2,900 feet (880 meters) deeper than the previous record holder.

About 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) away, the expedition also found a second mineral-rich vent field close to a section of seafloor where tectonic plates are separating.

There, unexpectedly, a chunk of mantle is poking through Earth's crust. (The planet's hot, semifluid mantle rock layer is typically contained miles below the planet's thin, hard outer crust.)

Though the mantle area is only half as deep as the deepest vent field, both sites are inhabited by hordes of new species, including sea anemones, fish, and swarms of 1-inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) shrimp (above) with purple organs that may detect infrared light beaming from the vents.

"We were absolutely stunned to find these vent sites," said marine geochemist Doug Connelly of the U.K.'s National Oceanography Centre and a member of the expedition.

Vents like this "may be far more common than we think they are," he said. "We just may not be looking in all of the right places."

The discoveries follow closely behind another deep-sea expedition just north of Antarctica by the same team. That investigation found warm bastions of life—including new yeti crab species and a ghostly octopus—on the usually near-freezing ocean bottom. 

From NationalGeographic.com 

Scientists Set for First Expedition to Earth's Deepest Sea Vent by Andrea Mustain

A shimmer of superheated fluid gushes from an opening some 3 feet (1 meter) across near the top of a hydrothermal vent deep in the Caribbean. Researchers are returning to the intriguing site, and one of its deeper and more mysterious neighbors, to sample them for the first time.

 

Eat your heart out, Jules Verne: This week, a ship packed with scientists is setting out for a three-week Caribbean cruise to one of the most extreme and least explored places on Earth. It's a real-life trip that might have been ripped from the pages of the imaginative novelist's fantastical fiction. 

The 23 scientists aboard the research vessel Atlantis are embarking on a first-of-its-kind mission; their quarry lies in the perpetual night of the deep ocean, in a mysterious world powered only by the furious heat of the planet's inner workings.

Their destination appears in Google Earth as a shadowy gash in the Earth just south of the Cayman Islands.

It is the Mid-Cayman spreading ridge, a rift in the seafloor some 70 miles (110 kilometers) long and more than 9 miles (15 km) across, where geologic forces are shoving two tectonic plates apart and birthing new oceanic crust — and fueling what may be two of the most remarkable hydrothermal vent sites on Earth.

Until recently, it was thought that hydrothermal vents — essentially, seafloor chimneys that spew forth a scalding soup of chemically altered seawater — couldn't exist along the Mid-Cayman spreading ridge, also called the Mid-Cayman Rise. It is the deepest spreading ridge on Earth, plunging to nearly 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) in places, and also among the slowest moving, creeping apart at just 0.6 inches (15 millimeters) per year. Scientists thought that, at such a snail's pace, the system lacked the volcanic heat required to sustain a hydrothermal vent.

But in 2009, scientists discovered two.

One vent, the Von Damm, may offer clues to how life first arose on our planet. The other, dubbed the Piccard, lies 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) below the surface — the deepest vent ever discovered on Earth — and may prove to be the hottest. 

Read more: 

Hairy Crabs and Pale Octopuses: Antarctic Vents Reveal New Marine Species by Mark Brown

                                              Unidentified pale octopus on the Antarctic seafloor.

A lost world of animal life has been discovered on the Antarctic sea floor, after an aquatic robot found various new species clustered around hydrothermal vents.

These vents are fissures in the Earth's surface, which spew out water rich in chemicals and heated to boiling temperatures by the interior of the planet. Hydrothermal vents are home to animals found nowhere else because they get energy by breaking down those chemicals, instead of from the Sun.

Researchers led by the universities of Oxford and Southampton, the National Oceanography Center, and British Antarctic Survey have been able to explore the East Scotia Ridge deep beneath the Southern Ocean, for the first time, with a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV).

They found black smokers -- a type of vent that can reach temperatures up to 382 degrees Celsius and spits out chemicals like hydrogen sulphide. Here the team found "a hot, dark, lost world," said research leader Alex Rogers of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, "in which whole communities of previously unknown marine organisms thrive."

Around these vents they found various new species. They discovered an undescribed predatory seastar with seven arms, which crawls across fields of stalked barnacles. Nearly 2,400 metres down on the seafloor they found an unidentified octopus that's so pale it's almost completely colorless.

Read more: 

Deep-sea Creatures at Volcanic Vent by Rebecca Morelle

            

           The team used an underwater robot to film the creatures living around the hydrothermal vent 

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.

Species such as this sea cucumber are not found in neighbouring ridge systems

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.

Dr 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.

Dr 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.

The team used an underwater robot to find creatures, such as this scaly-foot snail, around the vents in the Indian Ocean

"Also some sea cucumbers - not known from the Atlantic or Central Indian vents, but known from 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).

Dr 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."

There was a diverse mix of creatures, including this stalked barnacle, around the vents

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," Dr 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.

Dr 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."

Shrimp like this one may be under threat from deep-sea mining.

From BBC Science-Environment News