Cold, Dark and Teeming With Life

[Ian David]

The deep seabed was once considered a biological desert. Life, the logic went, was synonymous with light and photosynthesis. The sun powered the planet’s food chains, and only a few scavengers could ply the preternaturally dark abyss.

Then, in 1977, oceanographers working in the deep Pacific stumbled on bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and big tube worms — a cornucopia of abyssal life built on microbes that thrived in hot, mineral-rich waters welling up from volcanic cracks, feeding on the chemicals that leached into the seawater and serving as the basis for whole chains of life that got along just fine without sunlight. In 1984, scientists found that the heat was not necessary. In exploring the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, they discovered sunless habitats powered by a new form of nourishment. The microbes that founded the food chain lived not on hot minerals but on cold petrochemicals seeping up from the icy seabed.

Today, scientists have identified roughly one hundred sites in the gulf where cold-seep communities of clams, mussels and tube worms flourish in the sunless depths. And they have accumulated evidence of many more — hundreds by some estimates, thousands by others — most especially in the gulf’s deep, unexplored waters.

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The world’s richest known concentration of these remarkable communities is in the Gulf of Mexico. The life forms include tube worms up to eight feet long. Some of the creatures appear old enough, scientists say, to predate the arrival of Columbus in the New World.


COMMUNITY In an ecosystem known as a cold seep, which thrives on the Gulf of Mexico seabed, tube worms that could be centuries old thrive among corals, crabs, bitter stars and other creatures.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/science/22cool.html

Hat-tip to: http://twitter.com/gemswinc/status/16770391396

[Odin2005]

1. K&R

[Blue_Tires]

2. ttt

[kgnu_fan]

3. Are they going to die?????

[phantom power]

4. Nobody even knows -- we're in terra incognita

Isn't that exciting?

We've opened Pandora's box. Now we get to sit back and watch the hilarity ensue.

[Forkboy]

5. Sounds like my hamper.

K&R