Photo: National Science Foundation/Wikimedia.
A 5-foot-wide flange, or ledge, on the side of a chimney in the Lost City Field is topped with dendritic carbonate growths that form when mineral-rich vent fluids seep through the flange and come into contact with the cold seawater.
I’ve always loved legends about the Lost Continent of Atlantis and really wanted to believe the theory propounded in Looking for Dilmun, by Geoffrey Bibby. But my roommate after college was an archaeology major and told me it was all fantasy.
Fortunately, there’s a kind of Lost City to spark the imagination in the Atlantic.
William J. Broad writes at the New York Times, “Researchers have long argued that regions deep in the Earth’s oceans may harbor sites from which all terrestrial life sprung. In the Atlantic, they gave the name ‘Lost City’ to a jagged landscape of eerie spires under which they proposed that the life-preceding chemistry may have churned. …
“A report in the journal Science on Thursday tells of a 30-person team drilling deep into a region of the Mid-Atlantic seabed and pulling up nearly a mile of extremely rare rocky material. Never before has a sample so massive and from such a great depth come to light. …
“ ‘We did it,’ said Frieder Klein, an expedition team member at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. ‘We now have a treasure trove of rocks that will let us systematically study the processes that people believe are relevant to the emergence of life on the planet.’
“The drilled region sits alongside one of the volcanic rifts that crisscross the global seabed like the seams of a baseball. Known as midocean ridges, the abyssal sites feature hot springs whose shimmering waters shed minerals into the icy seawater, slowly building up strange mounds and spires that sometimes host riots of bizarre creatures. …
“ ‘A lot of people did lab work and paper studies and modeling on the origin of life,’ said Deborah Kelley, an oceanographer at the University of Washington. … The new research, she said, ‘is really important. … It lays a foundation for new understanding.’
“Early last year, the expedition … drilled deep into the rocky seabed adjacent to one of the largest known springs — a mid-Atlantic site some 1,400 miles east of Bermuda known as Lost City, which Dr. Kelley helped uncover in 2000. Its tallest spire rivals a 20-story building.
“The core retrieved nearby has a length of 1,268 meters, or some four-fifths of a mile, far deeper and more substantial than any comparable sample from beneath the undersea springs. The operation has brought into scientists’ labs the first long section of rocks originating in the mantle — the inner layers between Earth’s crust on which we live and the planetary core. It is the largest region of the planet, but its inaccessibility makes it poorly understood. Over eons, hot mantle rocks flow like extraordinarily thick fluids that slowly rearrange the cool planetary crust, lifting mountains, moving continents and causing earthquakes. …
“The mantle breakthrough was part of the International Ocean Discovery Program, a research consortium of more than 20 countries using a giant ship to drill into the ocean floor and retrieve rocky samples that bare Earth’s secrets. The ship is a modified oil exploration platform, 470 feet long and with a 200-foot derrick that lowers a hollow drill that bores into the seabed and retrieves cylindrical samples of rocks and other deep materials.
“ ‘We were astounded’ at how easily the rocky samples came to light,’ [C. Johan Lissenberg, the first author of the Science paper and a petrologist at Cardiff University in Wales] said. …
“The discovery raised waves of excitement in the community that studies life precursors because Michael J. Russell, a geochemist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, had predicted the existence of such cooler springs. He saw them as ideal for nurturing life.”
More at the Times, here. Cool photos.
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