I came here for the first time 50 years ago,
on my honeymoon.
It was certainly not my intention to be unfaithful,
but here on these cliffs I fell under the spell of a mistress.
One that has not released her grip in all these years.
I was just a young geologist,
fascinated by the layered rocks thrust up from the deep oceans,
millions of years ago.
Here is where I found
the very strange fossilised burrows
of an animal that lived hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs.
Only now, after 50 years,
do we have a chance to solve this great mystery,
and maybe catch the oldest living fossil on earth,
Paleodictyon Nodosum.
The research vessel Atlantis,
destination is the mid-Atlantic ridge system
500 miles ahead and 12,000 ft. down.
On board are some 58 sailors,
engineers, and scientists,
including geologist Peter Rona,
and palaeontologist Dolf Seilacher.
It was Peter Rona who found mysterious patterns of holes on the deep sea floor.
After many letters back and forth,
here we were,
two old fossils with the chance to solve a wonderful puzzle of science.
The deep ocean submersible Alvin.
She has spent more hours in the deep sea than all of the world's submersibles combined.
For the upcoming dives,
she is being outfitted with high resolution cameras
and 4000 Watts of illumination.
Great care is taken in the preparation of each dive.
For Alvin and her crew are bound for the harshest place on earth.
The search for the oldest living fossil actually began 30 years earlier
on a series of dives in another ocean entirely
the eastern Pacific.
Scientists were investigating a curious temperature differential in the water column.
What they found
was clearly some kind of a volcanic process that was building elaborate structures.
Water descending into fissures in the sea floor
was apparently interacting with the hot rocks beneath
to re-emerge as a black cocktail of poison chemicals.
While it was difficult for scientists to understand the geological processes at work,
the animals living on the chimneys were virtually impossible to comprehend.
The sub's temperature probes indicated water hot enough to melt lead
and it was heavily laden with hydrogen sulphide.
There should have been nothing alive here at all.
Among these amazing creatures was the worm, alvinella.
Like tiny court jesters mocking science itself,
they danced in and out of the poison water,
hot enough to boil a lobster bright red.
As sunlight creatures,
we didn't think to look in the dark for life,
nor did we think to look in water hot enough to boil us alive.
The discovery of hydrothermal vents in the Pacific near Galapagos
was the first step in a 30 year quest
to connect Silicer's ancient fossils on the cliffs of Spain
with the mysterious lifeforms on the mid-Atlantic sea floor.
Human exploration of the deep sea is a slow, complex and dangerous process.
Finding the target miles below the ship will be difficult enough.
Recovering a living specimen would be a triumph for the team.
On board this dive is marine geologist Peter Rona.
Chief pilot is Bruce Strickrott,
observer is palaeontologist Dolf Seilacher.
It will take over two hours for Alvin to make the 2 1/2 mile journey to the sea floor.
Within the first thousand feet,
all traces of sunlight will disappear.
As the sub descends,
there is always a chance scientists may glimpse a creature never before seen by human eyes,
and perhaps never to be seen again.
The soft-bodied creatures of the sea
will hardly ever leave a trace behind
no fossil that a palaeontologist could study millions of years later.
Yet these creatures were probably around hundreds of millions or even a billion years ago
there is just no way for us to know.
They are like phantoms of the sea.
Travelling to the sea floor and back
will use up five hours of Alvin's air supply and battery power,
leaving scientists with only four hours to find their target and recover their specimens.
Depending on ocean currents, however,
Alvin may have drifted well off course on the long trip down.
I was expecting only mud in every direction.
We had landed on the most fantastic landscape I had ever seen.
This was a very recent eruption.
I could easily imagine the red-hot lava boiling up from deep below,
creating almost animal-like shapes the size of a Volkswagen beetle.
It felt like a journey to the centre of the earth.
Here in the deep Atlantic where the American and European plates rub together,
Alvin can actually fly from the American plate to the European
in not much longer than the blink of an eye.
It is called, simply, the mid-ocean Ridge.
10,000 ft. high, 500 mile wide,
and some 40,000 miles long.
It is the largest geological feature on the face of the earth.
The outer shell of the earth floats on a hot underlying layer.
Where the plates move apart,
magma rises, to form the mid-Ocean Ridge.
This volcanic system is the oven of planet Earth.
It bakes the earth's crust on a daily basis,
it boils sea water,
serving-up nutrients to creatures of the abyss and occasionally,
it roasts them alive.
In the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Mexico,
the animals were helpless in the face of molten lava
suddenly emerging from the surrounding crevasses.
Between one Alvin dive and the next,
an extraordinary world simply disappeared.
Replacing it, were sculptures of cooled rock,
left behind after most of the lava had flowed back down into the volcano.
It was like the ruins of an ancient civilisation.
A grim memorial to an oasis of life burned away,
perhaps never to return.
But when Alvin descended after the eruption,
scientist were puzzled by what they saw.
As they approached the volcano at 9° north,
mysterious spaghetti worms covered the rocks
and there were large anemones growing nearby.
Galatheid crabs,
numerous species of octopus,
including something that they named "Dumbo",
whose purpose at the edge of this poison oasis defied comprehension.
There was zoarcid fish,
giant tubeworms
and golden mussels everywhere.
There were billions of tiny white feather dusters,
filtering nutrients from the hot water emerging from the rocks.
Life had not just returned to the volcano at nine north
in a few short of years,
it was back with a scale and vigour almost beyond belief.
This was truly an extraordinary place, like no other on earth.
It had seen a billion years of darkness,
yet there was no night.
It was a place without seasons, without rest, without time.
A world driven by the rhythms of the inner earth.
At the centre of this strange resurrection of life
was a magnificent 40 ft. high volcanic monolith,
decorated with six-foot long tubeworms.
The tubeworms clearly prospered amongst the hottest water as the pillar grew upwards.
The most important clue lay at the bottom of the pillar.
Here, there were tubes, but no worms.
Unable to move, and left behind in the cold,
these unfortunate creatures had apparently starved to death.
With no mouth and no stomach,
and planted permanently in the rock,
the tubeworms at first seemed more like plants than animals.
Scientists, however, found specialised bacteria in the tubeworms' tissues
that were using chemical energy and hot water to make nutrients.
The bacteria were, in effect, turning poison into food
and sharing it with their host, the tubeworm.
The red filaments on the top of the worm
draw hydrogen sulphide from the water to feed the bacteria inside.
This miracle is called chemosynthesis.
Scientist were astonished to discover the tubeworms' red colour
comes from blood containing haemoglobin
very much like our own.
So who are these fantastic creatures of the dark,
who share with us the very blood that flows through our veins?
5 billion years ago, a giant star,
a 100 times greater than our own sun,
blew itself into a supernova.
Throughout the remaining cloud of gas and debris,
there accumulated enough matter to reignite new stars,
including our own Sun.
It is believed that the planets then formed,
orbiting round the Sun,
growing larger and larger as they acquired debris from space.
As the earth cooled and built a solid crust,
the oceans were able to form.
Life then flourished,
blanketing the earth with green plants
by harnessing energy from the Sun,
using photosynthesis.
We once believed the Sun's radiation to be the only source of energy for all life on earth.
But deep beneath the earth's crust, there remains an ancient furnace,
fuelled by decaying radiation from that long-ago giant star.
It is this energy that gives life to the extraordinary animals of the deep sea.
An eruption of life, driven by the embers of a dead star,
still burning, deep within the earth.
Over the years, as Alvin threw her beams of light across the abyss,
the spirit of this volcanic forces has begun to seem almost limitless.
Just as scientists managed to unravel one mystery,
another would loom out of the darkness.
They call it "lost city".
Vast cathedrals are formed as water descends into the mantle of the earth,
then heats-up chemically and reappears,
building enormous sculptures of limestone.
The bacteria living here,
and the ecosystem around them
are based on an ancient methane chemistry,
unlike any of the vents previously discovered.
Without these new discoveries in the deep sea,
mysteries like those found on the cliffs in Spain would remain forever locked in stone.
The fossils Dolf Seilacher found here
are among the first evidence that life on earth would learn to build complex structures,
but how?
And why?
Paleodictyon is a living fossil.
The oldest were simple meanders,
made by animals struggling in the mud.
But over hundreds of millions of years,
the tunnels became more and more elaborate
until these creatures learned to build a perfect hexagonal pattern.
This creature and its tunnels survived mass extinctions that killed
almost all other life on earth.
So what was it is wonderful secret?
Once scientists knew where to look,
they began to find an almost limitless variety of hydrothermal structures
growing along the mid-Atlantic ridge.
They make possible a fantastic wilderness of life as rich as anywhere on earth.
It was very difficult to imagine that these structures
were not created for the animals inside.
The bowls are so perfect to serve up the soup of bacteria for the shrimp to eat.
Everywhere we went, the geology was as-if alive.
Massive structures growing not in millions of years,
but almost before our eyes.
For years, almost every dive would produce more questions than answers,
around almost every corner, another puzzle.
But after decades of exploration and study,
some mysteries began to unfold.
At the centre of the relationship between the animals
and the flow of energy from the chimneys,
are hundreds of species of specialised bacteria
growing on the rocks.
The bacteria use chemical energy from the hot water
to produce nutrients necessary to sustain their metabolism.
The shrimp grazing on the rocks use the bacteria as food.
For the shrimp there is a fine line between a good, solid meal and getting burned alive.
The white shrimp at the top of this mound
has burned off most of its extremities whilst grazing among the hot rocks.
What began as a curiosity in that Pacific
has become a vast worldwide phenomenon.
Dozens of new sites have been explored throughout the mid Ocean Ridge system.
Scientists were not expecting much of interest on the mid-Atlantic ridge.
What they found was the most fantastic vent of them all.
The size and shape of a football stadium,
they dubbed it the Houston Astrodome.
Chemosynthetic bacteria, it turns out,
were not just growing on the rocks, but on the shrimps, themselves.
The shrimp are coated in a slimy layer of bacteria,
which they scrape off and eat.
The shrimp seem to fight for position in the hot water,
in order to feed their coat of bacteria.
When scientist began to look beyond the obvious feeding patterns of the animals,
and probe deeper into the chimney walls themselves,
they made perhaps the most astonishing discovery.
In total darkness,
bathed in the poison breath of the inner earth,
at 3500 lb. of pressure per square inch
and temperatures exceeding 230° Fahrenheit,
lives the microscopic hyperthermaphile.
We did not even think to look here for life.
There is no harsher environment on earth.
There is no creature more alien to us.
Yet as we journey down deeper among the molecules of its DNA,
we reach the four base chemicals of life's universal alphabet.
This is the language of human DNA.
And in this, we are most certainly related.
There is a good chance that this is where life began on earth.
And here among the embers of that long ago dead star,
is where we began our journey, 5 billion years ago.
With the discovery of microbes living in the vents,
perhaps miles below the sea floor,
scientist began to consider that most of the biomass on earth might well live here,
beneath the volcanoes of the deep sea.
No one knows how or why a vent shuts off,
but here, where billions of creatures once thrived,
all that remains are great mounds of minerals.
Iron, zinc, silver and gold
once spewed from the furnaces beneath.
There is little in this metallic desert to sustain life.
To survive here
would require an entirely different strategy than a tubeworm,
a clam, or a shrimp could muster.
While most scientists barely noticed this place on their way to the hot spots nearby,
Seilacher and Rona was search here
among the remnants of a dead volcano
for their mysterious crop circles of the deep
and a creature that thrives were others cannot.
We looked in the area people call the 'valley of paleodictyon'.
I was surprised that we should be looking where there was no obvious life,
but that is perhaps the animals' secret.
I certainly had not expected to find so many.
They were all over the place by the thousands.
As soon as I got there and looked at the hexagon shape,
and the arrangement of the holes,
I knew this was my paleodictyon nodosum.
The creature is probably farming bacteria
like the shrimp and the tubeworms.
But unlike them, it must be very efficient because the nutrients are so sparse.
We had very little time left so the sub pilot went to work, right away.
After all the trouble of finding them,
collecting some samples would be fairly easy.
At last, after eight hours in the sub and 50 years on the cliffs of Spain,
we finally had the paleodictyon.
It was a great moment.
We fully expected the creature to come swimming out at any moment.
But she did not.
Then we went in after it.
It was important for me that the tunnels would be there.
And the tunnels were there.
But not a creature in any of them.
Nothing.
There have been a dozen dives to the Valley of the paleodictyon over 10 years.
They have not yet found the animal itself,
but they have discovered its secret.
They believe the creature is farming bacteria in its tunnels,
and this enables it to live frugally on the sparse chemical remnants
of the dead volcano.
Because their tunnels match those on the cliffs of Spain,
it suggests they have outlived almost all other forms of life on earth.
The important thing is that it is still alive and digging it is wonderful burrows.
The same as the fossils I found 50 years ago on my honeymoon.
But she is very shy and we have not seen her.
And I probably never will.
But that is better, I think, because I can still imagine anything I want.
And my wife, Edith,
would have been happy that I never found my mistress of the deep.
As long as we have had eyes to see,
we have gazed into the night sky
and tried to imagine what might be bathed in the light of distant stars.
We know now,
that the spirit of life also thrives in darkness,
among the embers of the dead stars,
and we must try to imagine that as well.