“That is a big f***ing plume,” German said, his rotating headgear paused on the ear-flapped ushanka. The deeper white layers may represent hydrothermally altered volcanic rocks, while dark grey volcanic rock becomes visible at the base of the depression. Later tows would reveal even more black smokers on the seafloor. Haematite filament attached to a clump of iron from the hydrothermal vent deposits. Nereid Under Ice explores Aurora hydrothermal vent field By Staff Writer Robert Ballard, Ocean ExplorerRobert D. Ballard is Founder and President of the Ocean Exploration Trust; Director of the Center for Ocean Exploration and Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. Dual Anonymous Reviews in ROSES 2020 Nov. 22, 2019. Hydrothermal vent fields discovered in the southern Gulf of California clarify role of habitat in augmenting regional diversity. The expedition proposed the name "Aurora" for the vent field. But exactly how long the site has been erupting is still an open question, as are many of the other mysteries the team set out to solve. Using the Ocean Floor Observation and Bathymetry System (OFOBS) high-resolution camera and WHOI’s Nereid Under Ice (NUI) submersible, the researchers found that the remote Aurora field shows stark differences to hydrothermal vent fields further south. Just two hours before it was time to head home, the team caught their first glimpse of a small chimney, a fleeting photobomb by a smoking vent that slid into the margins of several frames. The images revealed that the vent field is covered with extinct chimneys, heaps of extruded minerals, and not just one, but at least three black smokers. For a long time, canonical wisdom had suggested that hydrothermal vent activity could only exist at the fastest spreading mid-ocean ridges—places like the East Pacific Rise, where Earth’s tectonic plates are hustling away from one another at speeds of around seven inches a year. The observations raise some tantalising possibilities for what might be lurking in the seas beyond Earth, where sunlight is scarce and the only reliable form of energy might be chemically generated by the heaving innards of an ice-crusted moon. Find out more with our interactive atlas of moons. That evening, scientists were clustered around TV screens throughout the ship, anxiously watching the seafloor drift by under the inky twilight. The pumice-like sediments grew darker and darker, and then, for a moment, a violently churning cloud tickled the corner of the image, followed by the curving jaw of a giant, toothed crater. Hydrothermal vents form along mid-ocean ridges, in places where the sea floor moves apart very slowly (6 to 18 cm per year) as magma wells up from below. It can spend half a day underwater before being recharged, can swim more than 25 miles from the ship, and can dive three miles down without imploding, allowing it to work under thick ice cover. An international and multidisciplinary team of 36 scientists and engineers, with the assistance of the officers and crew of the vessel, has conducted a multidisciplinary investigation of deep (4000 m) hydrothermal vents under permanent ice cover in the Arctic, investigating the Aurora vent field (82.5°N) in the Gakkel Ridge. Figure 1: R/V Kronprins Haakon sailing through thin ice between two large ice floes. The site, 200 miles north of Greenland, is about 2.5 miles below the ice-covered surface. Photo: E. Ramirez-Llodra, NIVA. “Silica in the deep is always easily available,” Rapp says. "We found more hydrothermal activity on this cruise than in 20 years of exploration on the mid-Atlantic Ridge," said Charles Langmuir, co-chief scientist on Healy from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University. But the vent signatures written into the freezing sea suggested that something much more massive must lie below. The 50-foot-tall formation came out of nowhere—pinnacles of volcanic material vomited from beneath the seafloor. There's a thermal vent in the safe shallows, I cannot remember exactly where though, I think it's somewhere toward the aurora, maybe the south-east region? “We can dispense with that myth now.”. Ana Hilário, an ecologist from Portugal’s Universidade de Aveiro, was particularly stunned by the absence of Sclerolinum, a type of polychaete worm that’s abundant elsewhere in the deep sea. Exploring the Aurora Hydrothermal Vent Field Nov. 23, 2019. The bright orange Nereid Under Ice vehicle gets lowered into Arctic waters from the Kronprins Haakon. Now that we’re here, Chris German isn’t paying much attention to the dramatic seascape. A roughly five-inch-long sea anemone adds a pop of brilliant white to the muddy seafloor of the Aurora hydrothermal vent field, at the bottom of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Nereid Under Ice (NUI) exploring the arctic waters off the northern coast of Greenland. (This is the engine that drives Earth's tectonic plates apart, moving continents and causing volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.) Ganymede has a weak magnetic field, and, like on Earth, this generates an aurora—the glow created when high-speed subatomic particles slam into the extremely thin atmosphere. Any reference in this website to any person, or organization, or activities, products, or services related to such person or organization, or any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party, do not constitute or imply the endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of the U.S. Government, NASA, or any of its employees or contractors acting on its behalf. He has also discovered hydrothermal vents and “black smokers” in the Galapagos Rift and East Pacific Rise in 1977 and 1979. Chris German is a Co-Lead Investigator for the Astrobiology Program’s Research Coordination Network (RCN), the Network for Ocean Worlds (NOW). Answering these questions presented challenges even before the icebreaker left port. Instead of rising, NUI stopped moving, its depth reading becoming a foreboding line that marched across a screen in the ship’s control room. As the ship drifted, the cloud expanded into a massive black plume that engulfed the camera and continued billowing upward for nearly half a mile. During that cruise, a layer of murky water detected near the seafloor hinted at vent activity, and a rock-dredge pulled up the remains of an extinct chimney. At these bursting planetary seams, the brisk spreading of Earth’s crust means that fresh magma is always available to fuel the vents. The bright orange submersible has an on-board brain that lets it function human-free, yet it can also be remotely piloted, meaning that scientists watching a live feed from its cameras can tell it to pluck specific animals from the deep-sea floor, dunk collecting tubes into particular sediments, and dip specially designed probes straight into the effervescent, sulfuric fluid erupting from a hydrothermal vent. … They estimate that worldwide, deep-sea hydrothermal vent microbial communities can produce more than 4,000 tons of organic carbon each day, the building block of life. This vent, it seems, is the realm of small snails and scavenging, shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods. Scientists first went prospecting for hydrothermal plumes along the Gakkel Ridge in 2001. Doing so will help determine the habitability of these water-bearing bodies. The organisms that survive on the resources billowing out from the ocean floor seem to be sparse compared to other sites. Sometimes measuring more than three feet across, and with lifespans predicted to span centuries, these glass sponges are occasionally said to be barely alive. How extensive is the entire system? The expedition proposed the name "Aurora" for the vent field. But two days after arriving at the Aurora seamount, NUI dove and did not come back up. It’s one of the most northward vent field yet recognized, and also it’s among the deepest worldwide, resting almost 2.5 miles listed below an irreversible covering of sea ice. NASA Scientists Confirm Water Vapor on Europa Nov. 20, 2019. Over the years, though, German and his colleagues have found vents populating a variety of ridges, including some that languidly go their separate ways. A Global Map of Titan's Surface Nov. 21, 2019. “The idea is to really understand this area when it’s still pristine,” says deep-sea ecologist Eva Ramirez-Llodra, the project’s lead scientist from the Norwegian Institution for Water Research. In general, oceanic hydrothermal vents arise when seawater seeps through cracks in Earth’s crust and mingles with hot rocks beneath the surface; those buried molten rocks heat the saltwater and fuel chemical reactions that erupt in a roiling mass through vents in Earth’s crust. The divers found Beggiatoa, sulfur dependent bacteria, growing directly above the vents. Worse, a deep-diving, remotely operated submersible from Woods Hole called Nereid Under Ice, or NUI, was very nearly lost to the deep. This elusive zone is called the Aurora hydrothermal vent field. At the Aurora site, a three-foot-tall chimney billows black smoke (upper right) near fallen chimneys fanned out along the seafloor like tree trunks in a forest. Without many samples from the site’s life-forms, for instance, the team doesn’t have the genetic material needed to easily answer several of their pressing questions about how creatures move between ocean basins. It requires 3 parts scanned to obtain the ingredient list for this object. During a second cruise in 2014, German and his colleagues returned to Aurora aboard the icebreaker Polarstern. The abyssal seafloor is an unforgiving place for even the hardiest robots, and this mission has seen its share of mishaps, including a few heart-stopping days when it seemed like the team had lost its main underwater rover to the freezing polar ocean. NUI is a state-of-the-art, £2-million submersible roughly the size of a minivan. Top predators found can include eel-like Zoarchid fish, lobsters and even octopi. The team is interested in whether the ice above the vent holds signatures of the chemistry and biology churning along the seamount far below. Previous expedition found vent Researchers were allowed to use the RV Kronprins Haakon, Norway’s new icebreaker, and departed from Longyearbyen, on the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, on September 19. However, these observations come from only a handful of images that the team was able to capture, and only future exploration of the Aurora hydrothermal vent field will provide a complete picture of this unique ecosystem. Instead, they’ve adapted to survive on low concentrations of dissolved organic matter and make their skeletons out of more readily accessible building blocks. It’s the most northerly vent field yet known, and it’s among the deepest in the world, sitting nearly 2.5 miles below a permanent covering of sea ice. This elusive zone is called the Aurora hydrothermal vent field. The expedition proposed the name "Aurora" for the vent field. Ocean Floor Observation and Bathymetry System. This elusive zone is called the Aurora hydrothermal vent field. Geochemist Eoghan Reeves of the University of Bergen, who once (accidentally) took a swig of the seafloor libation, and says the bubbly mixture resembles bad champagne: “It smells just terrible, and it tastes exactly like it smells.”. Brilliant orange and yellow patches appeared, and the camera began climbing, moving up a stunningly steep, craggy wall. Fortunately, NUI dove to the seafloor after being fixed up and collected some glass sponges from a spot near the vent. Instead, he’s staring intently at a live feed of the seafloor, and he’s trying on hats. Perhaps less than five percent of their biomass is organic, and the rest is silica, the same stuff that makes sand and glass. The Nereid Under Ice submersible starts its exploration of the ice-covered Arctic waters off Greenland in October. And, for the astrobiologists on board, what insights might the site bring in efforts to detect life on ice-covered ocean worlds across the solar system? 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