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Scientists on an expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge have turned up about a mile of valuable rocks beneath an exotic feature linked to the possible beginning of life.
By William J. Broad
Researchers have long argued that the deep regions of Earth’s oceans would possibly host sites where all life on Earth originated. In the Atlantic, they have given the name “Lost City” to a jagged landscape of spires under which, they believe, the chemistry that preceded life may also have taken place.
And for the first time, specialists have managed to glimpse this Garden of Eden.
A paper published Thursday in the journal Science tells of a team of 30 people drilling deep into a region of the mid-Atlantic seafloor and extracting about a mile of an incredibly rare set of rocks. Never before has such a large and deep pattern been brought to light. This is at the heart of a primary theory about the origin of life.
“We did it,” said Frieder Klein, an expedition team member at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. “We now have a treasure trove of rocks that will allow us to systematically examine processes that other people believe are related to the emergence of life on the planet. “
The perforated region sits next to one of the volcanic faults that cut through the world’s seafloor like the seams of a baseball. Known as mid-ocean ridges, those abyssal sites are home to hot springs whose crystal-clear waters spew minerals into the icy sea water, slowly building strange mounds and spires that harbor disturbances by strange creatures.
For decades, scientists have hypothesized that hot springs or underlying rocks fueled geochemical reactions that generated life on Earth billions of years ago. Recently, they have accelerated their search for clues to back it up.
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