2:15:45 
2024-11-04 
364
Animal life is flourishing underneath the seafloor according to a new study of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, suggesting this mysterious landscape has complex ecosystems.
Previous research had found microbes living underground near hydrothermal vents, but this is the first reported discovery of larger animals such as worms and snails in the underground habitat.
Hydrothermal vents are openings in the seafloor where the Earth’s tectonic plates meet, and seawater mixes with magma from below the Earth’s crust. Much of the ocean floor is thought to be nearly uninhabitable, but around hydrothermal vents there’s an explosion of life.
Communities of shrimp, crabs, tubeworms, mussels, and hundreds of unique animal species have been previously found around, but not underneath, these vents. They’re known as “extremophiles,” or life that can survive under extremely high temperature and pressure. These organisms survive not on the sun’s energy, which fuels the food web elsewhere on Earth, but on nutrients produced when seawater mixes with magma.
Most of the seafloor remains a mystery to scientists, with only 26 percent of the global seafloor mapped, and this new research suggests it might be more populated than scientists thought.
“Every [new] study just confirms how little we understand about the seafloor,” says Rachel Lauer, geologist at University of Calgary, who was not involved in the new study.
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