The Deep Sea Vents

A volcano erupts in the black dark night on a remote part of the Planet. Thick plumes like black smoke are coming out from it. The terrain temperatures rise to 600o F while it comes out from the magma blankets; deep cracks formed around the volcano and superheated water seeps from them.

Though the magma is deadly for the local habitat but they don’t evacuate the area. The water is hot but thousands are able to thrive in a seemingly hellish habitat.

This volcanic eruption that has been going on for weeks is not the typical volcanic activity. It’s happening at the deep-sea vent more than 8,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

Deep-sea vents are given different names such as deepwater seeps, deep-sea springs, and hydrothermal vents. These vents are usually found at the bottom of the ocean and are created by volcanic and tectonic activity in the areas where huge hostile plates are converging or spreading apart. Magma ejects lava along the margins of these plates most of time slowly but some times with such ferocity that it creates instant lava lakes. The thick black smoke in fact is a plume of metal rich, superheated water billowing out of the silt and sediment covered gray and white under water volcano chimney.

The seawater gradually seeps into the vents under thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, before returning to ocean it is superheated and filled with manganese and other minerals. This discovery helped the scientists to theorize that each drop of seawater circulates through the earth’s crust, by way of the vents, every 10 to 20 million years. The discovery of the vents revealed that only the rivers did not drop all of the minerals in the sea.

The vents in Deep Ocean first were discovered in 1977 at Galapagos rift. The vents were found in the depth of the ocean where sunlight doesn’t reach, these vents are only visible in the floodlights of a manned submersible such as Alvin. This is three-person submarine that can descend 12,800 feet below sea level.

Though the creatures found near the vents are not the most beautiful but according to scientific perspective those are the most fascinating of all the world’s underwater wonders. Marine biologists have an opportunity to study a food chain that functions without sunlight at the geothermal vents. Before that most biologists believed that only sunlight through photosynthesis could support life on Earth. But at the vents life begins with bacteria that metabolize hydrogen sulfide and in turn bacteria becomes food for the other animals in the vent community.

Almost 300 species of life are found near the vents from them the best documented life forms are the red tipped tubeworms, which are the 12-foot tall creatures whose 300,000 tentacles strain food from the water. While on other hand the shallow ocean tubeworms have only dozen or so tentacles and grow only a few inches long.

In other species at vents there are blind crabs and shrimp, which don’t need to in a lightless world, live among octopuses that eat crabs and mussels.  The other attractive residents include pink vent fish, sea cucumbers, sponges, and brittle stars, flowerlike animals that use their fine appendages to anchor themselves to rocks.

In Pacific and Atlantic Oceans several vents had been discovered and so many are hidden a mile or more below sea surface. Scientists believes that studying the life near the vents specially about the bacteria can give clue about the beginning of the life on the planet Earth millions of years ago.