| Irena Guettel |
BREMEN, Germany (dpa) – Microscope-wielding scientists in Germany are examining wafer-thin samples of extraordinary submarine rocks that fuel life in the sunless depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
They come from the Atlantis Massif, a nearly 4,000-metre-high mountain on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, part of the world’s longest mountain chain.
“The results will provide a lot of new insights,” said Gretchen Frueh-Green, a professor in the department of earth sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ).
In October, she and Beth Orcutt, a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in the US state of Maine, led a six-week expedition to explore the massif.
The rocks are unlike those common on the seafloor, as they were pushed up six kilometres from the Earth’s mantle, the layer lying between its core and thin crust, by the divergence of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.
A marine scientist examines a sample of a drill core taken from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, at a laboratory in the University of Bremen, Germany, February 1. EPA
Due to their distinct chemistry, they react with seawater, in a process called serpentinisation,to produce methane, hydrogen and heat – and a deep-sea ‘oasis’ for unique micro-organisms.
Warm alkaline waters rising from the mantle rocks have also created the spectacular ‘Lost City’ hydrothermal field at the Atlantis Massif: white towers of carbonate tens of metres tall.
One member of the expedition team was able to view several samples under a microscope on board the British research ship James Cook.
He discovered numerous micro-organisms, Orcutt said, adding, “But we still don’t know what sort and how varied they are.”
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