The rock here could also be harboring entirely new forms of life. “There is really no place like this in the world,” Klein says, wiping his forehead of sweat. Here, though, it’s much shallower, much more accessible-and it’s continuing to evolve as it interacts with seawater. Mantle rock isn’t particularly rare it covers wide swaths of the deep seafloor around the globe. Over the course of this very slow process, mantle rock, which usually lies hidden 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) below the crust, has been forced to the surface. This gap has widened by about a finger’s width every year since, which is why Europe and North America are now separated by nearly 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) of ocean. Klein tells me that below us, millions of years ago, the tectonic plates of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began splitting apart. A few hundred meters to the north, waves crash and fizz on the shores of the 15 bite-sized rock islets. Klein is standing barefoot on Alucia’s top deck in cargo shorts and a faded MC5 t-shirt, squinting in the noonday sun. “It’s a unique area, and so it might host some unique life systems,” says Frieder Klein, a marine geologist, who’s leading the scientific team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
Nobody has ever explored these deep waters, and no one on the team knows what we’ll find. The team will spend the next two weeks aboard the M/V Alucia-a 56-meter (184-foot) research vessel operated through the Dalio Ocean Initiative-scanning the ocean floor, sampling rocks, analyzing water samples, and diving research submarines a thousand meters beneath the surface. These are big, serious questions, and we’ve brought a big, serious team to investigate them, including a crew of more than 40 geologists, microbiologists, geophysicists, biologists, engineers, deep-ocean divers, and deckhands from a dozen nations. We came to collect clues from this place, known as Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago, about how life on Earth first began-and how alien life might evolve on other planets in the solar system. We came to explore the waters deep below the sunlit surface. There was no white sand, no volcanic peaks, no palm trees, none of the trappings of other tropical island chains at this latitude, just razor-sharp umber peaks iced in a thousand years of bird shit-the whole of it resembling a kind of sinister Gilligan’s Island.īut we didn’t motor from the coast of Brazil more than a thousand kilometers (620 miles) across the Atlantic on a beach holiday or three-hour tour.
It was smaller than I had imagined, all told about twice the size of a soccer field. By our third day at sea, we’d found it: a dozen bare and jagged piles of rock surrounded by ocean the color of Windex.
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