Author: Sabrina Imbler / Source: Atlas Obscura
Around 6,500 feet below the Gulf of California, Mexico, the seafloor hosts a candy-colored light show. Hot pink, orange, and snow-white plumes strobe out from a deep sea valley ridged with pagoda-shaped hydrothermal vents, called volcanic flanges.
There are “mirrors pools,” too, upside-down puddles of vent fluid that reflect back whatever swims beneath them in a deep-sea mirage.While conducting a routine survey of microbial communities that dwell around hydrothermal vents, Mandy Joye, a microbiologist at the University of Georgia, discovered one of the most colorful chemical hotspots in the ocean. Joye’s team previously surveyed the area in November 2018 with a mapping bathymetry robot, which stumbled upon a patch of craggy topography that resembled mountains at the bottom of the sea. Joye returned to investigate the site in late February 2019 in an expedition on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel, funded by the National Science Foundation. What she found was astonishing: an entire valley of massive hydrothermal vents spewing sherbet-colored fluids.
Joye’s team initially expected to discover some novel microbial habitats, but no one expected anything on this scale. The largest of the towers reached up to 75 feet high and 32 feet across. And each vent rippled in volcanic flanges, horizontal ledges that build up as hydrothermal fluid flows out of the vent and reacts with the surrounding seawater. When 350-degree-centigrade hydrothermal vent fluid meets two-degree boring old…
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