So you might say what are we doing in a disused herring factory on the north coast of Iceland?
But actually, just outside this laboratory,
just a few hundred meters out to sea, is a bubbling hydrothermal vent.
A really remarkable environment where you've got this superheated seawater,
and all these animals clustered around it. And we're here to find out more
about what on earth is going on there.
So we're a team from the Natural History Museum in London, from the University of Leeds and
from the University of Southampton, and we're here in this amazing place, Eyjafjordur,
a fjord on the north coast of Iceland, to document these remarkable underwater habitats,
these hydrothermal vents on the seafloor.
Hydrothermal vents are really one of the most amazing discoveries of the 20th century.
When they were found people found these amazing novel life forms there, these giant tube worms
in the deep sea. For a long time, people thought they were very unusual and extreme ecosystems,
but actually now we know they're prevalent right through the world's oceans,
and perhaps they are places where life evolved originally.
Microbial life, many billions of years ago, could well have originated at hydrothermal vents.
One of the things that excites us about vents
is really not just about this idea that it's the origin of life, but actually, that
they've driven the evolution of animal life in our more recent oceans and our more recent past
and we potentially could see that here in this fantastic example here in the fjord in Iceland.
Oh, do we want to tape up, just tape up the connector? Oh you've done it!
Yeah, actually, I want to just put a bit of tape.
Extra bits that hold it together are always good.
There's pretty much nothing in ocean science or perhaps any science that isn't held together with a bit of tape.
Bit of tape. Bit of tape and a cable tie.
We can do a cable tie if you want? John: No no it's fine.
Yeah, good to go.
ROV is in the water
and we're just having a little hunt for the vents with the sonar on the ROV.
Shouldn't be too hard to find, it's quite a big chimney sticking up so the sonar should
see it when we're at the right depth and pointing in broadly the right direction.
Adrian: What was that, depth? 17 meters - one seven.
We have our mini ROV, Rex in the water at the moment
and we're looking for the hydrothermal vent chimney
which should be at around 20 meters depth, East of where we are right now.
OK I'm at 20 meters - two zero meters.
So this is the vent site which
I'm going to be diving on to collect animals from but this is our first Rex dive and we're going to use
that as a guide for when I dive on the site a little bit later, so hopefully we'll see
interesting animals that I can go and collect at a later date.
I'm very excited. This is gonna be the first time I get to see a vent that close.
Adrian: Something like, there it is. I can see it.
Moment of truth!
Did you find it? Yeah, we're just coming up on the vent and
it's pretty exciting. So I'm just gonna come up here and have a look at the marine life here.
We've just gone straight into the vent chimney
all at about 25 meters. We're going to come up now to the top, have a look at that fluid
that's coming out on top, surveying the animals that we're going to pick up later with the
scuba operation. So it's great.
So piloting an ROV is obviously very different
to scuba diving, but it's actually is like very immersive, like you feel you're there.
Oh you can see the shimmering water beautifully there. Look at that!
Oh I can feel it warm in my belly.
Rex the ROV is fantastic because it can spend
long periods underwater, doesn't get cold, doesn't complain, can go really, really deep,
but we need a human. We need a human to get down there and collect those samples by hand
and actually bring them back up to the surface. Chris can go down and fill his bag up with specimens
that we can then then study here in the lab.
This is a perfect day. The sea is completely flat, we have the sun and the blue sky.
The only thing is we have to be back before dark, but that will be in August.
So the idea is that we're going to be collecting animals which are living close to the vent sites,
but also the same animal species away from the vents, as well.
And the idea then is to compare them genetically to see if we can see any differences in the genes
of the animals which are living close to the vent sites and then of the animals which are living
further away from the vent sites. And the idea is to see if there's some adaptation
of those animals to living close to those hydrothermal vent sites, which is a very challenging
sort of environment. And we think that animals may need to show genetic adaptations that
perhaps are not something that we can see looking at the animals directly, but it's
something expressed in their genetics.
We're heading back to the lab to take photos
of the specimens Chris just collected and we're also going to take some tissue samples.
Success! Fantastic.
Is it a big muscle? What is it?
Yeah I think it's modiolus. Whoa!
Fantastic. Now those are associated fauna.
So we can pick away at that. Collect all kinds of things. Okay. Shall we have a little look at it?
So now that we've got samples back from the
diving, one of the first things that we're going to do is take a really good photograph
of each specimen to document exactly what it looked like when it was alive and then
after that, we'll take a small sub-sample from the specimen and preserve it inside a
special solution, which makes sure its DNA doesn't degrade. And then we'll do further
DNA analysis when we're back in London.
We just have to make sure we document everything,
that we take nice photos of the specimens, but you can see them, the way they look when
they were alive, because as soon as we put them in ethanol, they're going to go white.
We brought a microscope all the way from the Natural History Museum in order to be able
to look for the tiny animals that might be living around the bigger animals that we collect during the dives.
When people first discovered hydrothermal vents,
there was a sort of general perception of them being extreme ecosystems, these sort
of high temperature, rich in chemical environments where life might struggle to exist.
But we have a sort of working, joke hypothesis really that actually the opposite is true -
everyone likes a hot bath. So why not the animals in the deep sea?
At this time of year, the sun just doesn't go down in Iceland, which makes it fantastic for doing science.
I have no idea what the time is now - it could be midnight, it could be midday.
We've been working really hard and really long hours collecting samples.
So it's actually a huge advantage. It's really wonderful.
When we get the samples back to the lab, we're going to analyse their DNA,
and we'll be so excited if we can see that the animals living on the hydrothermal vents are actually different
genetically and different physiologically to the animals, the same species, living on
the rocky walls around there. So it would be an amazing thing if we can find that, then
we can really show this as an example of speciation and adaptation to a vent environment right now,
here, in Eyjafjorduron, on the North coast of Iceland.