Life in the Dark - Deep Sea Ecosystems

Biologists always thought life required the Sun's energy, until they found an ecosystem that thrives in complete darkness.

Dr. Cindy Van Dover manoeuvres her robotic craft closer to the strange, rocky landscape below. It's totally dark, except for lonely circles of light where she points her flood lamps. Back on the mother ship her monitor reveals tall, thin towers of craggy rock billowing black smoke from their peaks. Very strange!

All around the towers stand dozens of red-and-white, tube-like organisms. These bizarre, 3-foot-long, wormish creatures have no mouth, no intestines, and no eyes. Stranger still, they derive their energy from the planet itself, not from the light of the nearby star -- a feat most biologists didn't believe possible until these creatures were found.

She steers toward the worms and uses the robotic arm to reach out and take a sample for later examination.

Is this a science fiction tale? No. Is the intrepid Dr. Van Dover truly exploring another world? Yes!

Van Dover is as real as is the alien world she's discovering. And both are right here are Earth!

Cindy Van Dover, a marine biology professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, is one of some 60 scientists, technicians and sailors who sailed aboard the research vessel Knorr from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution between March 27th and May 5th 2001. This 40-day expedition sent a 1-ton robotic submarine named JASON 2,000 metres down to explore the peculiar sunless world of deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Images courtesy Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution A view of a "chimney" vent (top photo) captured by the deep-sea submersible JASON. The superheated black water pouring from the vent provides high-energy chemicals that sustain the tubeworms (bottom photo) and other organisms that thrive in this unlikely habitat.

"I really never thought that one could be an explorer in this day and age," said Van Dover, chief scientist for the expedition and a member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "But in the ocean, it's absolutely true," she added. "You're going places that nobody's ever been before!"