In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun

It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field in the eastern Pacific. Rutgers microbiologist Costantino Vetriani, seated a few feet away from me in the dark control room, radiated energy despite the hour. He peered intently through his glasses at dozens of monitors, occasionally running a hand over his shaved head. On the live video feed from the remotely operated submersible on the bottom, we watched thick black smoke with a scorching temperature of over 350 degrees Celsius billow from a rocky tower a mile beneath us. It was a stunning sight, an underwater pillar releasing a storm of pent-up energy from the dark bowels of the Earth. Vetriani, a trim Italian clad in a T-shirt reading “RNA: The Other Nucleic Acid,” observed the raw power, his dark eyes shining. “A black smoker is a window into hell,” he said with a grin.

In fact, the black smoker may be a window into the eruption of life on Earth. Vetriani is part of a team of scientists who have come to the vents to study the microbes that carpet every surface in and around them. Earlier, in the ship’s library, chief scientist Stefan Sievert, a microbial ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, had outlined the goals of the month-long expedition. He explained that understanding how the microbes survive in the hellish vents—what nutrients they use and at what rates; how quickly they turn vent fluids into living biomass—could give insight into how biological life evolved. I was tagging along and assisting with record-keeping during the