Expedition To Return to Unique “Lost City” Thermal Vent Field

Now a Web site launched this week will follow a new 32-day expedition to the Lost City that starts April 21. The team leaves Barbados April 21 on board the Atlantis, operated by Woods Hole. It takes five days to reach the ocean above Lost City where researchers will use the submersible Alvin and an unmanned Autonomous Benthic Explorer. Lost City is nine miles from the nearest spreading center and sits on 1.5 million-year-old crust.

Researchers plan to grow and examine microorganisms recovered from the Lost City chimneys. The vent fluids there support a community of microorganisms believed to live off the gases methane and hydrogen, both byproducts of the process at Lost City which transforms the mineral olivine into a new mineral, serpentine. Some scientists speculate that life on this planet may have started in just such an environment. Since other deep sea vent expeditions have previously discovered new organisms previously unknown to science, Perhaps samples retrieved from this unique environment will be so primitive as to be truly alien.