I love arc volcanoes which is where we've spent you know the beginning of
this cruise because they're completely wacky and like nothing we've ever seen
but it's always good to come back to a black smoker especially a giant one that
we've never seen before. This is one of the most spectacular
sights I think I've ever seen it's just jaw-dropping and beautiful and
mesmerizing and these things are just pumping so much into the ocean it blows
me away temperatures of those events are above 300 degrees Celsius which is
pretty hot and you know just centimeters away from
that hot hot fluid there's those crazy shrimp and crabs and worms and snails
the candidate for the coolest animal behavior that I've seen is definitely
the crab they're highly highly sensitive to temperature so they will dip their
little claw into the temperature and then immediately dash away if it's too
hot so we've also seen this side of these crabs that is quite ferocious
feeding Furies where they have attacked and piled on other animals and we've
also seen that these crabs are cannibals they will literally rip one another
apart
today we saw something that we certainly have never seen before
looked like he was basically collecting bacteria off what appeared to be a
smaller female with eggs and was eating that bacteria so he was literally
grooming this smaller shell just in the same way that you would see chimpanzees
for instance picking drugs off of the hair of a mate or group members
incredible to see that same type of behavior in crabs that are 3,500 meters
under the feet even though the environments are so extreme life is
thriving by the incredible number of chemosynthetic animals just crawling
around on the surface of this chimney
I just love the way they look I've been studying them for eight years now almost
I've never seen anything like this before
as far as the morphology of the chimneys the minerals that make up that chimney
are not very permeable they're really stuck into narrow channels and their
only choice is to go up they can't go out so there's something about the
mineralogy there that's making those chimneys very impermeable and I don't
know the answer to that the hardest part about chimneys is getting them I feel
lucky that I get to have these samples and look at them so we can learn about
how long has this whole general area being Hadj thermally active no one's
come out and seen the things that we're seeing so being the first humans to go
down that drive on Sebastian look at these cool creatures it's absolutely
fantastic one of the things that we've already recognized is that the animals
living in the back arc are very different from the animals living on the
volcanic arc and we wanted to confirm that we know that now so now we can go
back and say aha geological setting is really important
probably influencing the chemistry and the microbes and therefore controlling
the animals
my favorite part about going to see is getting to share this experience with
other scientists and with the crew you know and it's wonderful to be able to
share these discoveries with the public and hopefully inspire you know the next
generation of scientists and engineers and understanding and appreciating our
planet
you