Houston Chronicle July 24, 2003, 8:03PM Key to life may be found in sea's hot vents, study says Associated Press WASHINGTON -- A collection of giant seafloor hot vents is thousands of years old and may be the type of place where life first developed on Earth, a study suggests. Located in the mid-Atlantic about 1,500 miles off the U.S. East Coast, the collection of towering vents discovered in 2000 has been nicknamed the "Lost City." Water coming out of the vents is heated by chemical reactions rather than the volcanic action seen at the better-known hot-smoker vents that have been studied in the past, according to the research team led by Gretchen Fruh-Green of Switzerland's Institute for Mineralogy and Petrology. Their findings are reported in today's issue of the journal Science. The Lost City-type of vents may be conducive to life because their fluids are less acidic and are rich in organic compounds, compared to the well-known black-smoker vent systems heated by volcanism, the researchers said. In addition, the water from these vents ranges from 105 degrees to 170 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with 700 degrees at volcanic vents. While the Lost City system, estimated to be 30,000 years old, is the only known one of its type, many others could exist, the researchers say. The fact that hot vents can occur without volcanic activity means they can exist in many more parts of the ocean, increasing the areas where microbial life could have formed, researchers said. Some of the vents are 18 stories tall, dwarfing the volcanically heated vents seen elsewhere. Water circulates through the vents by heat from serpentinization, a chemical reaction between seawater and the rock on which the Lost City sits. "It's difficult to know if life might have started as a result of one or both kinds of venting," said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer and co-author of the Science paper, "but chances are good that these systems were involved in sustaining life on and within the seafloor very early in Earth's history." Science: www.sciencemag.org http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2011073 Pretty cool!
