Animal life beneath the ocean floor

This is the recent discovery of an international team of researchers on the East Pacific Ridge, off the coast of Central America, at a depth of 2,500 meters.

Tube worms, which live inside tubes that they secrete themselves. This is what an international team of researchers discovered during the summer of 2023, thanks to the ROV SuBastian from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, deployed in an area rich in hydrothermal vents. Not on these chimneys, where the existence of this type of worm was already known, but underneath.

Published in Nature Communic ations, this unexpected discovery suggests that there is animal life beneath the ocean floor, where researchers until now thought that only microbes and viruses could survive in such extreme conditions, with pressure and intense cold, and in total darkness. One more argument for scientists, and States which advocate a ban, a moratorium orthe minimuma precautionary pause regarding the development of a text that would regulate seabed mining by 2025.

And this while another unprecedented discovery was announced during the summer: that of “black oxygen” produced not by living organisms, but by polymetallic nodules, the very ones which whet the appetites of industrialists because they are necessary for the production of electric batteries, solar panels or smartphones.

Spotted at a depth of 4,000 meters in the Clarion-Clipperton zone (North Pacific), which alone contains 21 billion tonnes of nodules, this “black oxygen” produced by electrolysis of seawater opens up new perspectives for research and could lead to the reformulation of fundamental models in biology and geochemistry, on the origin of the appearance of life on Earth.