A 天美影视传媒 oceanographer has helped create the first full-color photographic atlas of the ocean floor. “” (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was almost a decade in the making and contains more than 500 original illustrations and color photos, and access to online .

Its pages contain a history of deep-sea science and a global tour of the volcanoes, hot springs, rocks and animals that exist in extreme environments in the ocean depths.

“This book lets people see parts of the Earth that most of them have never seen or thought about before, and the processes that form fundamental parts of our planet 鈥� and it does it in a very illustrative way,” said co-lead author , a professor in the UW .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OYG485OeAg

The book comes with endorsements from ocean explorer Robert Ballard; Kathy Sullivan, the head administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and filmmaker James Cameron.

“This is the book I wish I’d had on my eight deep-ocean expeditions, to better understand the wonders I was gazing upon,” Cameron writes. He calls it “a must-own for anyone in the ocean sciences, and for those simply curious about what lies down there in the most remote realm on our planet.”

The book covers the history of exploration of the deep sea, and the geology and biology of the roughly 40,000-mile mountain chain of underwater volcanoes that cross the world’s oceans.

Kelley was lead author of the chapter on hydrothermal vents, including the black smokers venting metal-rich fluids of more than 700 F that she has studied for decades. Local examples include the vent fields and , off the Pacific Northwest coast.

Also described is the vent field, a completely distinct type of hot spring environment in the Atlantic Ocean that Kelley in 2000. There, limestone chimneys tower 180 feet above the seafloor hosting bizarre lifeforms she and her students have since .

“The life in these systems is very diverse, and in many ways we’ve just touched the tip of what’s down there,” Kelley said.

Other authors are Jeffrey Karson of Syracuse University, Michael Perfit of the University of Florida, and Daniel Fornari and Timothy Shank of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A veteran of the deep sea, Kelley has traveled to the seafloor more than 50 times to depths of more than 2 miles (4 kilometers) in the specialized submersible called , built to protect passengers from the bone-crushing pressures and near-freezing temperatures of the abyss.

She has seen ocean imaging technology evolve from grainy images to the high-definition photos contained in the book, and the HD video available on an accompanying .

“When I was first going to sea, we were still using 35 mm cameras, and one of my first jobs at sea was processing film on a rolling ship,” Kelley said. “Where we are now, the technology is exponentially increasing.”

Kelley is part of a current National Science Foundation that recently wired the largest underwater volcano off Washington’s coast and surrounding areas of the seafloor. More than 100 instruments will use Internet and high-voltage power to observe these dynamic environments in real time.

The entire ocean circulates through the seafloor every 8 to 10 million years, and so the seafloor composition is closely connected to the waters above.

It is not yet known how volcanic eruptions on the seafloor affect the life and chemistry of the oceans, and how the biological communities of the deep sea originate and evolve. The unexpected discovery of life on seafloor volcanoes, that survive off toxic gases instead of sunlight, has raised questions that have yet to be answered.

“These systems have really changed how we think about the oceans, and life on Earth and on other planets,” Kelley said.

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For more information, contact Kelley at 206-685-9556 or dskelley@uw.edu. The book is currently available for in the U.S. For press inquiries, contact publicist Rachel Ewen at rewen@cambridge.org.

On the marine microbial stage, there appears to be a vast, varied group of understudies only too ready to step in when “star” microbes falter.

At least that’s what happens at the Lost City hydrothermal vent field, according to work led by the 天美影视传媒 and published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Lost City hydrothermal vent field in the mid-Atlantic Ocean is the only one of its kind found thus far. It offers scientists access to microorganisms living in vents that range in age from newly formed to tens of thousands of years old. A bit player found in scant numbers in the younger, more active vents became the lead actor in a chimney more than 1,000 years old where venting has moderated and cooled, changing the ecosystem.

This is the first evidence that microorganisms can remain rare for such a long time before completely turning the tables to become dominant when ecosystems change, according to William Brazelton, a 天美影视传媒 postdoctoral researcher. It seems logical, but until recently, scientists weren’t able to detect microorganisms at such low abundance, Brazelton says.

It was in 2006 that scientists, led by Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., and a co-author on this week’s PNAS paper, published the first paper saying microorganisms in the marine environment had been woefully undercounted. They used the latest DNA sequencing techniques and said marine microorganisms could be 10 to 100 times more diverse than previously thought. They coined the term “rare biosphere” to describe a vast but unrecognized group of microorganisms — “rare” because each kind of microorganism, or taxa, appeared to be present in only very low numbers or abundance, so low that they were previously undetectable.

If the new way of determining microbial diversity was accurate, scientists were left to wonder why such a large collection of low-abundance organisms existed.

“A fundamental prediction of the ‘rare biosphere’ model is that when environmental conditions change, some of these rare, preadapted taxa can rapidly exploit the new conditions, increase in abundance and out-complete the once abundant organisms that were adapted to past conditions,” Brazelton and his co-authors wrote. Yet, they continued, “No studies have tested this prediction by examining a shift in species composition involving extremely rare taxa occurring during a known time interval.”

Until now.

Lost City was discovered during a National Science Foundation expedition in 2000 by UW oceanography professor and paper co-author Deborah Kelley and others. They were on board the research vessel Atlantis, which is one reason the field was called Lost City. The hot springs form in a very different way from the metal-rich, 700 degrees F black smoker vents scientists have known about since the 1970s. Water venting at Lost City is generally 200 F or less and the chimneys, vents and other structures at Lost City are nearly pure carbonate, the same material as limestone in caves. They are formed by a process called serpentinization, a chemical reaction between seawater and mantle rocks that underlie the field. The vent waters are highly alkaline and enriched in methane and hydrogen gases — important energy sources for the microbes that inhabit Lost City.

Lost City also differs from the magma-driven hydrothermal systems in that it is very long-lived.

Whereas there have been numerous seasonal and short-term studies of microbial responses to environmental changes — lasting years at the most — the Lost City hydrothermal vent field provided a way to look at changes in vent ecosystems 1,000 years apart in age.

Analyses by Brazelton and colleagues revealed that DNA sequences that were rare in younger vents were abundant in older ones. Because it is likely that the older Lost City chimneys vented higher-temperature, more alkaline fluids when they were younger, scientists think that as the ecosystem changed some of the rare microorganisms came to the fore.

This round of near-disappearance and then dominance could have happened repeatedly during the 30,000 year lifetime of the Lost City vent field so the microorganisms present today are “pre-adapted” to certain conditions and are just waiting for the ecosystem to suit them best.

“The rare biosphere of the Lost City microbial community represents a large repository of genetic memory created during a long history of past environmental changes,” the authors write. “The rare organisms were able to rapidly exploit the new niches as they arose because they had been previously selected for the same conditions in the past.”

Co-author Sogin says: “The ecological shifts over time spans of thousands of years at Lost City show that some of these rare organisms that are very closely related to the dominant taxa are not artifacts of DNA sequencing. The organisms are real, they are capable of growing and very subtle shifts resulted in them becoming winning populations.”

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and the W.M. Keck Foundation. Other co-authors on the paper are John Baross, UW professor of oceanography; Chuan-Chou Shen, National Taiwan University, Taipei; Lawrence Edwards, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and Kristin Ludwig, recent UW graduate now at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, Washington, D.C.

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For more information:
Brazelton is traveling the week of Jan. 11 but can be reached by cell at 206-407-6956, or braz@uw.edu
Kelley, 206-685-9556, dskelley@uw.edu

Note about images: Images are courtesy of the 天美影视传媒, Institute for Exploration, University of Rhode Island Institute for Archaeological Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hydrocarbons — molecules critical to life — are being generated by the simple interaction of seawater with the rocks under the Lost City hydrothermal vent field in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.

Being able to produce building blocks of life makes Lost City-like vents even stronger contenders as places where life might have originated on Earth, according to Giora Proskurowski and Deborah Kelley, two authors of a paper in the Feb. 1 Science. Researchers have ruled out carbon from the biosphere as a component of the hydrocarbons in Lost City vent fluids.

Hydrocarbons, molecules with various combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms, are key to cellular life. For instance, cell walls can be built from simple hydrocarbon chains and amino acids are short hydrocarbon chains hooked up with nitrogen, oxygen or sulfur atoms.

“The generation of hydrocarbons was the very first step, otherwise Earth would have remained lifeless,” says lead author Proskurowski, who conducted the research while earning his doctorate from the 天美影视传媒 and during post-doctoral work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Some researchers believe the first building blocks of life made their way from outer space while others hypothesize that the right ingredients were generated by geological process on Earth, perhaps at hydrothermal vent systems where seawater seeps into the seabed and picks up heat and minerals until the water is so hot it vents back into the ocean.

The Lost City hydrothermal vents, discovered by Kelley and others during a National Science Foundation expedition in 2000, are formed in a very different way than the black smoker vents scientists have known about since the 1970s. Black smokers are so named because it can appear as if smoke is billowing from them. In fact the smoke is actually dark iron- and sulfur-rich minerals precipitating when scalding vent waters — as hot as聽760 F –meet the icy cold depths. The spires and mounds that form are darkly mottled mixes of sulfide minerals.

In contrast, structures at the Lost City hydrothermal vent field are nearly pure carbonate, the same material as limestone in caves, and they range in color from white to cream to gray. The structures drape the cliffs at Lost City and range from the size of tiny toadstools to the 18-story column, named Poseidon, that dwarfs most known black smoker vents by at least 100 feet. The field was named Lost City in part because it is on top of a submerged mountain named Atlantis and was discovered by chance during an expedition on board the research vessel Atlantis.

Water venting at Lost City is generally 200 F. The fluids do not get as hot as the black smokers because the water is not heated by magma but rather by heat released during serpentinization, a chemical reaction between seawater and mantle rock.

That’s also the reason for all the hydrocarbons.

Naturally occurring carbon dioxide is locked in mantle rock. At Lost City, the reaction between the rock and seawater produces 10 to 100 times more hydrogen and the hydrocarbon methane than a typical black smoker system found along mid-ocean ridges, the Science co-authors found.

The Lost City system forms hydrocarbons in higher concentrations and with more complexity than do typical black smoker systems on mid-ocean ridges, says Kelley, a 天美影视传媒 professor of oceanography who was the principal investigator for a 2005 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s expedition that gathered the samples analyzed for the Science paper.

The hydrocarbons being produced at Lost City are not formed from atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater because none of the carbon carries the radioisotopic signature that would be present if they had been exposed to sunlight, Proskurowski says.

Analysis of rock from Lost City shows that the hydrocarbons are not coming from the living biosphere. Rock in contact with seawater has a very consistent ratio of carbon dioxide to helium. But the rock at Lost City had a strikingly different ratio. It turns out that the depleted amount of carbon dioxide in the rocks roughly equals the amount of hydrocarbons being produced in the fluids, he says.

“The detection of these organic building blocks from a non-biological source is possible evidence in our quest to understand the origin of life on this planet and other solar bodies,” Proskurowski says.

Lost City is exceptional, Kelley says, because chemical reactions in the seafloor produce acetate, formate, hydrogen and alkaline fluids. All these substances may have been key to the emergence of life, according to work published recently by Michael Russell and A.J. Hall of Glasgow and William Martin of Germany. In addition, acetate and formate found in Lost City fluids may have been an important energy source for the ancestors of methanogens, microorganisms that live off the methane at places like Lost City. It’s perhaps one more bit of evidence about where life may have originated, Kelley says.

Other co-authors of the paper, “Abiogenic Hydrocarbon Production at Lost City Hydrothermal Field,” are Marvin Lilley and Erick Olson from the 天美影视传媒, Jeffrey Seewald and Sean Sylva from Woods Hole Oceanograhic Institution, Gretchen Fr眉h-Green from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and John Lupton with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

The Lost City hydrothermal vent field is about 2,300 miles east of Florida, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, at a depth of 2,600 feet. Microorganisms there thrive in alkaline vent fluids, some nearly as caustic as liquid drain cleaner. This contrasts to the previously studied black-smoker vents where organisms have adjusted to acidic water. Lost City microbes live off methane and hydrogen instead of the carbon dioxide that is the key energy source for life at black-smoker vents.

Although nobody has found another field like Lost City, Kelley says she’s sure others exist because there are so many other places where mantle rock has been thrust up through the seafloor, exposing it to seawater and serpentinization. It is likely that even more mantle rock was present in the oceans of early Earth, Kelley says.

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For more information:
Proskurowski, (508) 289-3698, giora@whoi.edu
Kelley, (206) 685-9556, kelley@ocean.washington.edu

Expedition websites:
2005 cruise:
and
2003 cruise:
2000 discovery dive:

The hydrothermal vents were miles from where anyone could have imagined. One massive seafloor vent was an unheard of 18 stories tall. And all were creamy white and gray, suggesting a very different composition than vent systems studied since the 1970s.

Scientists who named the spot Lost City knew they were looking at something never seen before when the field was serendipitously discovered in December 2000 during a National Science Foundation expedition to the mid-Atlantic.

Last week in Science, researchers published for the first time findings about the gases produced at Lost City and the organisms that make their living off them. Both are so different from so-called black-smoker hydrothermal vents that they may provide a whole new avenue for looking for the earliest life on Earth and for signs of life on other planets, according to Deborah Kelley, UW oceanographer and lead author of the Science article.

Microorganisms at Lost City are living in fluids with alkaline pH that ranges from 9 to 11, which is nearly as caustic as Liquid-Plumr, Kelley says. This compares to the previously studied black-smoker vents where organisms are well adjusted to acidic pHs.

Further, she says, Lost City microbes appear to live off bountiful methane and hydrogen. Absent is carbon dioxide, the key energy source for life at black-smoker vents. And there is little hydrogen sulfide and only very low traces of metals, on which many of the microbes at the other kind of vents depend.

The difference in what鈥檚 available is because water circulates through the Lost City hydrothermal vent field via serpentinization, a chemical reaction between seawater and the mantle rock on which Lost City sits. The resulting fluids are 105 F to 170 F. At the other kind of field, first discovered in the early 1970s, volcanic activity or magma drives venting and fluids can reach 700 F. The vents at such sites are often referred to as black smokers because some emit hot, mineral-laden fluid that looks like dark, billowing smoke when it hits the icy cold seawater.

Carbonate minerals from fluids at Lost City drape nearby cliffs in brilliant white and form vents ranging in shape from tiny toadstools to the 18-story column, named Poseidon, which dwarfs most known black smoker vents by at least 100 feet. Some places resemble the sort of deposits one might see in spectacular caves with spires and smoothly rippled surfaces in a complex three-dimensional array, says Duke University鈥檚 Jeffrey Karson, co-author on the paper.

Another marked difference being published for the first time this week concerns the diversity of life. The fluids at Lost City harbor large amounts of microorganisms 鈥� comparable to what鈥檚 found in rich organic sediments. However the diversity of species is low, with, for example, just a handful of methane-producing and methane-consuming Archaea.

In surprising contrast, researchers discovered Lost City has a diversity of “larger” organisms that’s as high, or higher, than any known black-smoker vent sites. Missing from Lost City are the tubeworms, abundant shrimp and other readily observed organisms that heavily blanket some black smokers. The high diversity revealed itself only after a 2003 expedition when the biology team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Timothy Shank analyzed water samples “vacuumed” from around the vents.

“There aren鈥檛 a lot of each kind of animal; most are only a centimeter in size and have translucent or invisible shells so it鈥檚 no wonder we didn鈥檛 suspect the actual diversity,” says Kelley, who was chief scientist on the expedition, which like the 2000 voyage was funded by the National Science Foundation. Other large organisms include crabs, corals and fish.

Kelley will be co-principal investigator on another science expedition to Lost City this summer 鈥� without leaving the UW. She’ll use state-of-the-art communication technology to help direct investigations at sea during a mission with co-PI Bob Ballard, his Institute for Exploration, the Jason Foundation for Education and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ship and funding. Audiences at participating aquariums, museums and 20 Boys and Girls Clubs across the nation will have access to satellite transmissions during the journey.

Although nobody has yet found another field like Lost City, Kelley says she鈥檚 100 percent sure others exist because there are so many other places mantle rock has been thrust up through the seafloor, exposing it to seawater and serpentinization.

Even more such rocks were present on early Earth, Kelley says.

“We don鈥檛, in most places, have access to early Earth conditions so if we can understand the chemical reactions, sources of energy and how fluids circulate through Lost City, it may give us insight into how life started on this planet,” Kelley says.

She says Lost City could be compared to places on land with similar rock that is very old, such as that exposed in Barberton, South Africa, which is 3.5 billion years old. Perhaps Lost City can provide additional biomarkers, the chemical remnants of organisms, with which to look for life in those ancient rocks or on other planets.

The work being published was funded by the NSF, NASA Astrobiology Institute and a Swiss national science grant.

“The findings are an exciting example of NSF’s commitment to discovery through basic research,” said Bilal Haq, director of NSF’s marine geology and geophysics program. “Lost City shows us that geological, chemical and biological processes are intimately linked at a primal environment, and lends strong support to the need for interdisciplinary approaches to scientific research.”

Black smoker hydrothermal vent systems may have the fire power, but the staying power of seafloor hydrothermal vent systems like the bizarre Lost City vent field 鈥� discovered just two and a half years ago 鈥� is one reason they may have been incubators of some of Earth鈥檚 earliest life, say UW scientists and their co-authors in a recent issue of Science.

Lost City, in the mid-Atlantic Ocean about 1,500 miles from the United States, has the tallest vents ever seen. The 18-story tower at the site dwarfs most vents elsewhere by at least 100 feet. Water circulates through the vent field because of heat from a chemical reaction between seawater and mantle rock, rather than by heat from volcanic activity or magma, as in the black-smoker vents found on the seafloor 200 miles off the coast of Washington. Both systems teem with microorganisms capable of living off the vent fluids, which would be toxic to all other life.

If hydrothermal venting can occur without volcanism, it greatly increases the places on the seafloor of early Earth where microbial life could have started, says Deborah Kelley, UW oceanographer and one of the co-authors. 鈥淚t鈥檚 difficult to know if life might have started as a result of one or both kinds of venting,鈥� she says, 鈥渂ut chances are good that these systems were involved in sustaining life on and within the seafloor very early in Earth鈥檚 history.鈥�

It also means explorers may have more places than previously thought to look for microbial life in the universe.

Although the Lost City vent field is a youthful 30,000 years old, Lost City-type systems might be able to persist hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of years. It鈥檚 possible that black-smoker systems might last as long as 100,000 years but it鈥檚 unlikely, Kelley says. That鈥檚 because black-smoker systems typically form where new seafloor is being created, a process that 鈥� even if a volcanic eruption doesn鈥檛 bury a hydrothermal vent field in lava 鈥� eventually shoves the seafloor bearing the vents away from the source of volcanic heat needed to power them.

Lost City is 9 miles from the nearest volcanically active spreading center and sits on 1.5 million-year-old crust. Seawater permeating deeply into the fractured surface of the mantle rocks transforms olivine into a new mineral, serpentine, and generates heat to power hydrothermal circulation.

A big reason this kind of system is so self-sustaining is that fracturing happens during tectonic movements and because rocks undergoing serpentinization increase in volume from 20 percent to 40 percent. Kelley likens it to water seeping into tiny cracks in roads, then freezing and expanding to cause ruts and frost heaves in the pavement.

Other Science co-authors are UW graduate students Kristin Ludwig and Giora Proskurowski, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology鈥檚 Gretchen Fr眉h-Green and Stefano Bernasconi, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration鈥檚 David Butterfield.

This spring, the National Science Foundation funded the first major scientific expedition to Lost City since its discovery. Led by Kelley and Karson, the expedition is documented at: /

A new hydrothermal vent field, which scientists have dubbed “The Lost City,” was discovered Dec. 4 on an undersea mountain in the Atlantic Ocean. The unexpected discovery occurred at 30 degrees North on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge during an oceanographic cruise aboard the research vessel Atlantis.

A team of scientists led by Deborah Kelley from the 天美影视传媒, Donna Blackman from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Jeff Karson of Duke University conducted the National Science Foundation-supported expedition.

“We thought that we had seen the entire spectrum of hydrothermal activity on the seafloor, but this major discovery reminds us that the ocean still has much to reveal, “says Margaret Leinen, NSF assistant director for geosciences.

“These structures, which tower 180 feet above the seafloor, are the largest hydrothermal chimneys of their kind ever observed,” said Deborah Kelley, a 天美影视传媒 geologist and co-principal investigator on the cruise.

Most previously studied vents are less than 80 feet high, the tallest being a 135-foot vent dubbed Godzilla, on the seafloor off the Washington state coast. It toppled in half a few years ago.

“If this vent field was on land, it would be a national park,” Duke University structural geologist Jeff Karson said of the new find. Karson, a second co-principal investigator, joined Kelley in the submersible Alvin on a dive to the site on Dec. 5.

Perhaps most surprising is that the venting structures are composed of carbonate minerals and silica, in contrast to most other mid-ocean ridge hot spring deposits, which are formed by iron and sulfur-based minerals. The low-temperature hydrothermal fluids may have unusual chemistries because they emanate from mantle rocks.

Nothing like this submarine hydrothermal field has ever been previously observed, say the scientists. These events are unique, they believe, because they rest on one-million-year-old ocean crust formed tens of kilometers beneath the seafloor, and because of their incredible size. Dense macrofaunal communities such as clams, shrimps, mussels, and tube worms, which typify most other mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal environments, appear to be absent in this field. The Lost City Field was discovered unexpectedly while studying geological and hydrothermal processes that built an unusually tall, 12,000-foot-mountain at this site. In this area, deep mantle rocks called serpentinized peridotites, and rocks crystallized in subseafloor magma chambers, have been uplifted several miles from beneath the seafloor along large faults that expose them at the surface of the mountain.

“As so often happens, we were pursuing one set of questions concerning building of the mountain and we stumbled onto a very important new discovery,” said Donna Blackman, a geophysicist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and chief scientist of the expedition. She added that “the venting towers are very spectacular and, although they bring up a whole new set of questions, we will learn about the evolution of the mountain itself as we study the vents carefully in the future.”

Observations using the submersible Alvin and deep-towed vehicle Argo, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, show that the field hosts numerous active and inactive hydrothermal vents. The steep-sided, 180-foot-tall deposits are composed of multiple spires that reach 30 feet in width at their tops. They are commonly capped by white, feathery hydrothermal precipitates. The tops and sides of the massive edifices are awash in fluids that reach temperatures up to 160 degrees.

From the sides of the structures, abundant arrays of delicate, white flanges emerge. Similar to cave deposits, complex, intergrown stalagmites rise several meters above the flange roofs.

Underneath the flanges, trapped pools of warm fluid support dense mats of microbial communities that wave within the rising fluids. Downslope, hundreds of overlapping flanges form hydrothermal deposits reminiscent of hot spring deposits in Yellowstone National Park. During the Alvin dive, expedition leader Patrick Hickey collected rocks, fluids, and biological samples for shore-based analyses.

“By studying such environments, we may learn about ancient hydrothermal systems and the life that they support,” suggested Kelley.

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Kelley, Blackman and Karson are at sea until Saturday, Dec. 16, and return to their home institutions from there.

The three principal scientists may be contacted aboard ship until Sat. Dec.16. (Note: e-mail is only sent and received three times a day.)
Donna Blackman
Debbie Kelley
Jeff Karson

Expedition web site: