Lost City: Where Crust Meets Mantle

An anonymous reader writes "Track two-dozen oceanographers on their one-month expedition to the Lost City, submersed off the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Since up to a third of the planet's total biomass may live below 100 meters, one goal is to see if microbes can survive without volcanic heat--instead living off the heat of a limestone rock reaction where the crust meets the mantle. After 15 years of dormancy, this is also rumored to be the script line of the fourth Indiana Jones installment."

Re:Dude, it's atlantis!

[nobody69]

(Allow me to slip into comic book geek mode for a moment)

Dude, Aquaman and Prince Namor are from Atlantis. Wonder Woman is from Paradise Island/Thymiscira (sp?).

the mole people will get you!

[SHEENmaster]

*squish*

How long can subterranian structures hold up under the weight of our garbage?

Hydrothermal Fluid Particulate Sampler

[js7a]

That HFPS instrument [washington.edu] sure is cool.

Not cool enough to sign up to get spammed by their voyage diary, though. I'll let the NSF give that to the school kids, and read the results when they make it back to shore and through peer review.

Re:Hydrothermal Fluid Particulate Sampler

[superflippy]

Thanks for the link. I'm glad to see they're still using Alvin [washington.edu] for this expedition. It's a fascinating little vehicle. I read a book a while back about some of Alvin's adventures around the volcanic vents called The Octopus' Garden [amazon.com] . It's written by an Alvin pilot and has some great sketches the team made of what they found on their explorations.

hmmm...

[pyr0]

It's pretty cool that they found these hydrothermal vents, but the concept of fluids circulating deep down into the basement rock...even to the mantle...and then being re-circulated back up when heated is not new. This is the basic principle behind the formation of certain types of ore deposits.

I suppose the big thing with this discovery is the occurrence of life down there in the absence of extreme volcanic heat and not the presence of the vents themselves.