A new ecosystem has been discovered in volcanic caves beneath hydrothermal vents at an undersea volcano off Central America.
Using an underwater robot, a team of scientists overturned chunks of volcanic crust, discovering cave systems teeming with worms, snails, and chemosynthetic bacteria living in 75 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) water.
The discovery adds a new dimension to hydrothermal vents, showing that their habitats exist both above and below the seafloor.
Scientists have spent the past 46 years studying hydrothermal vents, but have never looked for animals under these volcanic hot springs.
Using an underwater robot, a team of scientists overturned chunks of volcanic crust, discovering cave systems teeming with worms, snails, and chemosynthetic bacteria living in 75 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) water.
The discovery adds a new dimension to hydrothermal vents, showing that their habitats exist both above and below the seafloor.
Scientists have spent the past 46 years studying hydrothermal vents, but have never looked for animals under these volcanic hot springs.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:10 It's difficult for me to describe how I feel because I feel so grateful and so lucky.
00:17 We made a discovery even better than what I was expecting.
00:20 This is a real discovery that will change, I'm sure, our view on life events.
00:27 We want to understand how animals travel, how they disperse.
00:32 We look for the first time into the subsurface life.
00:35 Animals are able to live below hydrothermal vents, and this is, I think, mind-blowing.
00:40 Now we know that, for example, tubeworms, they can colonize vents by traveling through the subsurface.
00:48 This is the first finding.
00:50 We know that these tubeworms, they can live in this cave system.
00:53 That's the second finding.
00:55 And the third finding is that also the mobile fauna, mobile vent fauna, can live in these subsurface areas.
01:03 The beauty of all of this is also that the experiment itself was not even working so well.
01:11 We kind of needed to be creative and, you know, apply basically a new method.
01:16 Flipping around the rocks opened our view into the underworld of hydrothermal vents.
01:23 Oh!
01:25 Whoa!
01:27 Behold!
01:28 That was a power move right there.
01:33 What we found was that we found even animals living below the surface.
01:39 And this is basically subsurface vents that can be potentially quite extensive.
01:46 Look at that. There's a tubeworm, a little tube here.
01:49 They're everywhere. It's our proof, basically.
01:53 Yes.
01:55 Nice.
01:57 And when you see researchers that really, like, spend their whole life studying this system,
02:02 and that they are, like, so happy because they still discover something new, this was like, wow, goosebumps.
02:13 Oceans constitute 70% of Earth's surface and more than 90% of Earth's biosphere.
02:20 By understanding all these small parts of the ocean, we can then see the bigger picture.
02:26 you