A British scientific expedition aboard the RRS James Cook has discovered the world’s deepest undersea volcanic vents, known as ‘black smokers’, 3.1 miles (five kilometers) beneath the surface of the Caribbean in an area known as the Cayman Trough.

The World’s Deepest undersea volcanic vents were uncovered using a robot submarine developed by engineers at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.

Deep-sea vents are undersea springs where water hot enough to melt lead erupts from slender spires of copper and iron ore on the ocean floor.

The vents were found 800m (2,600ft) deeper than any previously discovered.

The expedition to the Cayman Trough is being run by Drs Doug Connelly, Jon Copley, Bramley Murton, Kate Stansfield and Professor Paul Tyler, all from Southampton, UK.

They used a robot submarine called Autosub6000, developed by engineers at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, to survey the seafloor of the Cayman Trough in unprecedented detail.

The team then launched another deep-sea vehicle called HyBIS, developed by team member Murton and Berkshire-based engineering company Hydro-Lek Ltd, to film the world’s deepest vents for the first time.

“Seeing the world’s deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring,” says Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) based at the NOC and leader of the overall research program, in a press release.

“Superheated water was gushing out of their two-storey high mineral spires, more than three miles deep beneath the waves”.

In the dark, barren waters of the deep sea, such hydrothermal vents support an array of unique creatures—including giant tube worms, clams, and crabs—that aren’t found anywhere else on the planet.

“It was like wandering across the surface of another world,” says geologist Bramley Murton of the NOC, who piloted the HyBIS underwater vehicle around the world’s deepest volcanic vents for the first time. “The rainbow hues of the mineral spires and the fluorescent blues of the microbial mats covering them were like nothing I had ever seen before.”
The first vents were found three decades ago in the Pacific and forced scientists to rewrite the rules of biology because of the immense pressure – up to 500 times normal atmospheric pressure – experienced by the creatures living there.

Researchers will now compare the marine life in the Cayman Trough with that from previously discovered vents to gain a better understanding of life at the bottom of the ocean.

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