In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun - Issue 25: Water
▻http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/in-search-of-lifes-smoking-gun
It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field in the eastern Pacific. Rutgers microbiologist Costantino Vetriani, seated a few feet away from me in the dark control room, radiated energy despite the hour. He peered intently through his glasses at dozens of monitors, occasionally running a hand over his shaved head. On the live video feed from the remotely operated submersible on the bottom, we watched thick black smoke with a scorching temperature of over 350 degrees Celsius billow from a rocky tower a mile beneath us. It was a stunning sight, an underwater pillar releasing a storm of pent-up energy from the dark bowels of the Earth. Vetriani, a trim (...)