![]() ![]() The ROV Jason, which will explore Lost City and take samples this month. “Even really weird organisms living down at the sub-seafloor are enabling life on the surface.” “It would show that the earth is a highly connected system,” Lang says. ![]() The researchers hypothesize that microbes within the mountain introduce carbon and nutrients to the ecosystem, which enables microbial life on the surface of the chimneys. The expedition scientists plan to collect water streaming out of the chimneys to capture microbes that live deep within the Atlantis Massif. Jason will collect sediment from the seafloor and extract small samples of Lost City chimneys, but mostly, Jason will be collecting water. “The scientists use Jason as their eyes and arms on the seafloor.” “Jason looks like an SUV with a big tail coming out of the back,” says Beth Orcutt, a microbiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, who is involved in the expedition but not going herself. Navy research vessel (R/V) Atlantis will send a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), named Jason, down some 2,600 feet into Lost City to collect samples. “Life is always scrounging for something.”ĭuring the three-week expedition, scientists aboard the U.S. “One of the questions we’re trying to go after is, what are these microbes scrounging for?” she says. According to team co-lead Susan Lang, a geochemist at the University of South Carolina, solving this mystery is one of the primary missions of the expedition. While energy is abundant, it’s not yet clear where microbes in this deep-sea ecosystem get their carbon or nutrients. The chimneys also release methane, an organic molecule which is a rich source of energy for many types of life. “It’s the closest thing to a free lunch the universe provides,” Brazelton says. Hydrogen gas spewing from the chimneys provides an ample energy source for the microbes living in Lost City. Elend/UW/URI-IAO/NOAA/The Lost City Science Team Calcium-rich water from these vents then reacts with carbon in the seawater to form Lost City’s iconic carbonate chimneys.Ĭarbonate chimneys of Lost City imaged during a 2005 expedition to the hydrothermal vent system.ĭ. Rather, the vents are created when seawater encounters rock from the Earth’s mantle, creating gas and energy in a process known as serpentinization. Unlike more common types of hydrothermal vents, such as black smokers and methane seeps, Lost City is not fueled by volcanic activity. “We want to know how they’re living there,” says team co-lead William Brazelton, a microbiologist at the University of Utah.ĭiscovered in 2000, Lost City is one of only a few known places like it on the planet. This group of scientists wants to know how the microbes of Lost City make their living, what they eat and breathe, and how they survive in the extreme temperatures and pressures of the deep ocean. Tomorrow, September 8, a group of 22 researchers, microbiologists, geologists and oceanographers, will travel to Lost City for the first time in years. These microbes, thriving in a hydrothermal vent field deep in the Atlantic, hold the secret to life’s survival in such hostile environments-and they may even provide clues about the origins of life on Earth. The trillions of microbial residents of Lost City, perched on top of the Atlantis Massif, have become a fascination for scientists. What looks like a long-abandoned metropolis is, in fact, teeming with microscopic life. Hot alkaline fluids filled with hydrogen gas spew from the tops of these natural towers into the waters just east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Hundreds of white spires jut into the dark ocean, spanning the area of a city block and towering between 30 and 200 feet tall. Smack in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, atop an underwater mountain rising over 10,000 feet above the seafloor, sits Lost City. ![]()
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