An undated image provided by Deborah Kelley, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, and members of a research team shows the carbonate vents of the “Lost City” complex, a series of tall, jagged stone towers illuminated by the lights of deep-sea robotic submersibles in 2005. Scientists on an expedition to a mid-Atlantic ridge have unearthed nearly a mile of valuable rock beneath an exotic structure linked to the possible beginning of life. (D. Kelley/M. Elend/UW/URI-IAO/NOAA/The Lost City Science Team via The New York Times)
Researchers have long argued that there may be places in the depths of Earth’s oceans where all life on Earth originated. In the Atlantic, they named the “Lost City” a rugged landscape with eerie towers beneath which, they believe, the chemistry that preceded life was bubbling away.
And now, for the first time, specialists have managed to take a look at this potential Garden of Eden.
A report in the journal Science on Thursday reported that a 30-person team drilled deep into an area of the mid-Atlantic seafloor and unearthed nearly a mile of extremely rare rock material. Never before has such a massive sample been brought to light from such a great depth. The material is central to an important theory about the origin of life.
“We’ve done it,” said Frieder Klein, a member of the expedition team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “We now have a treasure trove of rocks that we can use to systematically study the processes that people believe are relevant to the origin of life on the planet.”
The region drilled lies next to one of the volcanic fissures that cut the global seafloor like the seams of a baseball. The deep-sea areas known as mid-ocean ridges contain hot springs whose shimmering waters release minerals into the icy seawater, slowly giving rise to strange hills and towers that are sometimes breeding grounds for bizarre creatures.
For decades, scientists have suspected that the hot springs or underlying rocks produced geochemical reactions that gave rise to life on Earth billions of years ago. Recently, they have intensified their search for supporting evidence.
“A lot of people have been doing lab work, studies and models on the origin of life,” said Deborah Kelley, an oceanographer at the University of Washington who has studied such clues but is independent of the team. The new research, she said, “is really important.”
She added: “It lays the foundation for a new understanding.”
Early last year, the expedition, officially titled “Building Blocks of Life,” drilled deep into the rocky seabed next to one of the largest known seeps – a site in the middle of the Atlantic, about 2,250 kilometers east of Bermuda, known as the “Lost City,” which Kelley uncovered in 2000. Its highest spire is as tall as a 20-story building.
The core recovered nearby is 1,268 meters long, or about four-fifths of a mile, making it significantly deeper and more extensive than any comparable sample from the underwater wells.
The operation allowed scientists to bring a long section of rocks from the Earth’s mantle – the inner layers between the crust we live on and the planet’s core – into their labs for the first time. It’s the planet’s largest region, but its inaccessibility means it’s barely explored. Over the eons, hot rocks flow from the mantle like exceptionally thick fluids, slowly rearranging the cool planetary crust, raising mountains, shifting continents, and causing earthquakes.
Scientists believe that detailed analysis of this wealth of rock will take many years and will lead to scientific discoveries, including those related to the question of the origin of life.
“It’s too early to say anything really concrete because the results aren’t in yet,” said C. Johan Lissenberg, the lead author of the Science article and a petrologist at Cardiff University in Wales. “But we’ll find out. That’s the exciting thing.”
The breakthrough in the Earth’s mantle was part of the International Ocean Discovery Program, a research consortium of more than 20 countries that uses a massive ship to drill into the seafloor and retrieve rock samples that reveal Earth’s secrets. The ship is a modified oil exploration platform, 470 feet long and equipped with a 200-foot-long derrick that lowers a hollow drill that bores into the seafloor and retrieves cylindrical samples of rock and other deep materials.
“We were amazed” at how easily the rock samples came to light, Lissenberg said. “They tend to break quite easily, and that jams the drill. We were like kids in a candy store as one core after another came to the surface.”
Lost City, like all deep springs, was formed when water beneath the sea floor warmed enough to rise and mix with icy sea water, causing the precipitation of minerals that formed the spring’s spires and towers.
But its discovery marked the scientific debut of a new class of deep vents, very different from those previously studied, in which rock vents spew extremely hot water black with minerals, nicknamed “black smokers.” In contrast, Lost City was not on the Mid-Atlantic Rift, but slightly off it. The fluids were cooler and the towers taller.
The discovery sparked great excitement in the community studying precursors to life, because Michael J. Russell, a geochemist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, had predicted the existence of such cooler vents, believing them to be ideal for the emergence of life.
That story explains the current excitement over what analyses of the expedition’s rock samples will reveal. Klein said the findings could tell us about the origins of life not only on Earth but elsewhere in the solar system and the universe.
“The importance of this ship and the cores cannot be overstated,” he said. “This is a fundamental resource for the future.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
