The Galápagos Rift hydrothermal expedition

Jack Corliss and the Alvin team · 1977 CE · Earth

The Galápagos Rift hydrothermal expedition — Jack Corliss and the Alvin team · 1977 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Dive on the temperature anomalies found the year before and prove that hot water circulates through the ridge.

Historical context

Geologists expected warm water on the mid-ocean ridges, because the chemistry of the whole ocean demanded it; nobody expected company. When Alvin settled beside a shimmering crack on the Galápagos Rift in February 1977, the scientists aboard found clams the size of dinner plates and worms taller than a man. A food chain that runs on sulphide instead of sunlight had been sitting there, undiscovered, for the whole history of biology.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Sailing from Panama

    1977 CE

    The submersible Alvin, its tender and the survey ship leave Balboa for a spreading ridge 1,200 kilometres to the south-west.

  2. Why the ridge should be hot

    1977 CE

    On passage, Corliss argues his doctoral case again: seawater must sink into the young crust, cook, and come back out somewhere.

  3. The camera sled goes down

    1977 CE

    A towed sled of cameras and thermometers is flown back and forth a few metres above the rift until a temperature spike marks a target.

  4. Alvin on the rift

    17 February 1977

    On 17 February 1977 Corliss, the geologist Tjeerd van Andel and pilot Jack Donnelly settle on fresh basalt at 2,500 metres.

  5. Clambake

    1977 CE

    Around the warm cracks lie clams the size of dinner plates, white crabs and mats of bacteria, on a plain of lava that should be a desert.

  6. The Garden of Eden

    1977 CE

    A second vent a little to the west carries clusters of white tubes a metre and a half tall, each tipped with a plume of blood-red gills.

  7. Preserved in vodka

    1977 CE

    The ship carries no biological fixative, so the first vent animals ever collected are put up in the crew's spirits.

Outcome

Hot springs found at 2,500 metres, surrounded by a dense animal community that lives on chemistry instead of sunlight.

Jack Corliss and the Alvin team

Geochemist who went looking for hot springs on the Galápagos Rift in 1977 and found, instead of chemistry, an ecosystem that does not need the Sun.

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Sources

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