“We do not fully understand how the animals who live on hydrothermal vents find them and come to the vents.” The #VentUnderworld team has embarked on an expedition to determine how animals are transported to hydrothermal vents and build communities. The team suspects that the answer does not solely lie in the waters above the … Continued
Traducción al español a continuación I come from Austria, a country in the middle of Europe that is landlocked but contains beautiful mountains, lakes, and rivers. Nevertheless, I have been drawn to the Ocean for as long as I can remember. I’d like to say that this is why I became a marine biologist, but … Continued
One of my favorite memories of sailing with Schmidt Ocean Institute was in 2016 when we were using the ROV SuBastian to explore volcanoes of the Mariana Arc and Backarc in the western Pacific. We live-streamed seafloor video from this amazing sulfur-rich underwater volcano called Daikoku back to shore, and we kept getting the question … Continued
Some of the most striking features of the deep sea are the amazing oases of life found at sites of hydrothermal venting. Elsewhere in the deep ocean, there is a low density of animals due to the fact that food is less abundant with depth, and thus, there is not enough energy to sustain a … Continued
Traducción al español disponible a continuación Written by Marc A. Fontánez Ortiz The deep sea is the largest ecosystem on Earth. It harbors a plethora of (bio)geochemical interactions, being the home to different life forms that range from shrimp to unicellular microorganisms. I am a geomicrobiologist who studies energy flow between water-rock-life interactions to understand … Continued
Traducción al español disponible a continuación Written by Julie Huber and Dave Butterfield Given bad weather to the north at the Kane Fracture Zone, we decided to test our strategy for finding active hydrothermal vents at the Puy de Folles vent field. Previous work by French and Russian colleagues at this site focused on inactive … Continued
Spanish Translation Below The origins of this expedition – “Searching for Serpentinization-Driven Hydrothermal Activity on Oceanic Core Complexes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge” – go back to the year 2000, when a talented team of marine geologists and oceanographers were surveying and exploring an oceanic core complex with the submersible Alvin at the intersection of the … Continued
Jagged piles of molten rock, sulfurous smoke, exploding gaseous emissions, shifting landscapes, otherworldly creatures, scalding acidic fluids, swirling plumes of volcanic gasses and particles, and crushing pressure of the overlying sea: what is not to like about active submarine volcanoes? If that’s not reason enough for come to these places, how about an opportunity to … Continued
Volcanic activity is enthralling, but when observed deep below the seafloor from a Remotely Operated Vehicle, like SuBastian, it has an additional mysterious and dream-like quality. Over the course of the next six weeks, Falkor will be sailing over one of the most active underwater volcano sites in the world, the Mata Volcano group.
