Original subtitles

I came here for the first time 50 years ago on my honeymoon.

It was certainly not my intention to be unfaithful, but here on these cliffs I

fell under the spell of a mystery, one that has not released her grip

in all these years.

I was just a young geologist, fascinated by the layer of rocks thrust

up from the deep oceans millions of years ago.

Here is where I found the very strange fossilized burrows of an animal that

lived hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs.

Only now, after 50 years, do we have a chance to solve this great mystery and

maybe catch the oldest living fossil on Earth, Palaeodiction nodosum.

the research vessel Atlantis.

Destination is the mid -Atlantic ridge system, 500 miles ahead and 12 ,000 feet

down. On board are some 58 sailors, engineers, and scientists,

including geologist Peter Rona and paleontologist Dolph Seiliger.

It was Peter Rona.

who found mysterious patterns of holes on the deep sea floor.

After many letters back and forth, here we were, two old fossils with a

chance to solve a wonderful puzzle of science.

The deep ocean submersible Alvin.

She has spent more hours in the deep sea than all of the world's submersibles

combined.

For the upcoming dive, she's being outfitted with high -resolution camera

,000 watts of illumination.

Great care is taken in the preparation of each dive, for Alvin and her crew are

bound for the harshest place on Earth.

The search for the oldest living fossil actually began 30 years earlier on a

series of dives in another ocean entirely, the Eastern Pacific.

Scientists were investigating a curious temperature differential in the water

column.

What they found was clearly some kind of a volcanic process that was building

elaborate structures.

Water descending into fissures in the sea floor was apparently interacting

the hot rocks beneath to re -emerge as a black cocktail of poison chemicals.

While it was difficult for scientists... to understand the geological processes

at work.

The animals living on the chimneys were virtually impossible to comprehend.

The sub's temperature probes indicated water hot enough to melt lead, and it

heavily laden with hydrogen sulfide.

There should have been nothing alive here at all.

Among these amazing creatures was the worm Alvanella.

Like tiny court jesters mocking science itself, they danced in and out of the

poison water hot enough to boil a lobster bright red.

As sunlight creatures, we didn't think to look in the dark for life.

Nor did we think to look in water hot enough to boil us alive.

The discovery of hydrothermal vents in the Pacific near Galapagos was the first

step in a 30 -year quest to connect Sileker's ancient fossils on the cliffs

Spain with the mysterious life forms on the mid -Atlantic seafloor.

Human exploration of the deep sea is a slow, complex, and dangerous process.

Finding the target miles below the ship will be difficult enough.

Recovering a living specimen would be a triumph for the team.

On board this dive is marine geologist Peter Rona.

Chief pilot is Bruce Vickron.

Observer is paleontologist Dolph Seiliger.

It will take over two hours for Alvin to make the two and a half mile journey to

the seafloor.

Within the first thousand feet, all traces of sunlight will disappear.

As the sub descends, there is always a chance scientists may glimpse a creature

never before seen by human eyes, and perhaps never to be seen again.

The soft -bodied creatures of the sea will hardly ever leave a trace behind.

No fossil that a paleontologist could study millions of years later.

Yet, these creatures were probably around hundreds of millions.

or even a billion years ago.

There is just no way for us to know.

They are like phantoms of the sea.

Traveling to the sea floor and back will use up five hours of Alvin's air supply

and battery power, leaving scientists with only four hours to find their

and recover their specimen.

Depending on ocean currents, however, Alvin may have drifted well off course

the long trip down.

I was expecting only mud in every direction.

We had landed on the most fantastic landscape I had ever seen.

This was a very recent eruption.

I could easily imagine the red hot lava boiling up from deep below.

creating almost animal -like shapes the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

It felt like a journey to the center of the earth.

Here in the deep Atlantic where the American and European plates rub

Alvin can actually fly from the American plate to the European and not much

longer than the blink of an eye.

It is called simply the Mid -Ocean Ridge.

10 ,000 feet high, 500 miles wide, and some 40 ,000 miles

long.

It is the largest geological feature on the face of the Earth.

The outer shell of the Earth floats on a hot underlying layer, where the plates

move apart.

magma rises to form the mid -ocean ridge.

This volcanic system is the oven of planet Earth.

It bakes the Earth's crust on a daily basis.

It boils seawater, serving up nutrients to creatures of the abyss, and

occasionally it roasts them alive.

In the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Mexico, the animals were helpless in

the face of molten lava suddenly emerging from the surrounding crevices.

Between one Alvin dive and the next, an extraordinary world simply disappeared.

Replacing it were sculptures of pooled rock, left behind after most of the lava

had flowed back down into the volcano.

It was like the ruins of an ancient civilization.

A grim memorial to an oasis of life burned away, perhaps never to return.

But when Alvin descended after the eruption, scientists were puzzled by

they saw.

As they approached the volcano at nine degrees north, mysterious spaghetti

covered the rocks, and there were large anemones growing thereby.

Galatheid crabs.

Numerous species of octopus, including something they named Dumbo.

whose purpose at the edge of this poison oasis defied comprehension.

There were Zoracid fish, giant tube worms, and golden mussels everywhere.

There were billions of tiny white feather dusters, filtering nutrients

hot water emerging from the rocks.

Life had not just returned to the volcano at Nine North.

In a few short years, it was back with a scale and vigor almost beyond belief.

This was truly an extraordinary place like no other on Earth.

It had seen a billion years of darkness, yet there was no night.

It was a place without seasons, without rest, without time.

A world driven by the rhythms of the inner Earth.

At the center of this strange resurrection of life was a magnificent

-high volcanic monolith decorated with six -foot -long tubeworms.

The tubeworms clearly prospered amongst the hottest water as the pillar grew

upwards.

The most important clue lay at the bottom of the pillar.

Here there were tubes, but no worms.

Unable to move and left behind in the cold, these unfortunate creatures had

apparently starved to death.

With no mouth and no stomach, and planted permanently in the rock, the

worms at first seemed more like plants than animals.

Scientists, however, found specialized bacteria in the tube worms' tissues that

were using chemical energy in the hot water to make nutrients.

The bacteria were in effect turning poison into food and sharing it with

host, the tube worms.

The red filaments on the top of the worm draw hydrogen sulfide from the water to

feed the bacteria inside.

This miracle is called chemosynthesis.

Scientists were astonished to discover the tube worm's red color comes from

blood containing hemoglobin, very much like our own.

So who are these fantastic creatures of the dark?

who share with us the very blood that flows through our veins.

Five billion years ago, a giant star, a hundred times greater than our own

sun, blew itself into a supernova.

Throughout the remaining cloud of gas and debris, there accumulated enough

matter to reignite new stars, including our own sun.

It is believed that the planet then formed, orbiting around the sun, growing

larger and larger as they acquired debris from space.

As the earth cooled and built a solid crust, the oceans were able to form.

Life then flourished.

Blanketing the Earth with green plants by harnessing energy from the Sun using

photosynthesis.

We once believed the Sun's radiation to be the only source of energy for all

life on Earth.

But deep beneath the Earth's crust, there remains an ancient furnace, fueled

decaying radiation from that long -ago giant star.

It is this energy that gives life to the extraordinary animals of the deep sea.

An eruption of life driven by the embers of a dead star, still burning deep

within the Earth.

Over the years, as Alvin threw her beams of light across the abyss, the spirit

of this volcanic force has begun to seem almost limitless.

Just as scientists managed to unravel one mystery, another would loom out of

darkness.

They call it Lost City.

Vast cathedrals are formed as water descends into the mantle of the earth.

then heats up chemically and reappears, building enormous sculptures of

limestone.

The bacteria living here and the ecosystem around them are based on an

methane chemistry unlike any of the events previously discovered.

Without these new discoveries in the deep sea,

Mysteries like those found on the cliffs in Spain would remain forever locked in

stone.

The fossils Dolph Seilacher found here are among the first evidence that life

Earth would learn to build complex structures.

But how?

And why?

Paleodiction is a living fossil.

The oldest were simple meanders made by animals tunneling in the mud.

But over hundreds of millions of years, the tunnels became more and more

elaborate until these creatures learned to build a perfect hexagonal pattern.

This creature at its tunnels survived mass extinctions that killed almost all

other life on Earth.

So what was its wonderful secret?

Once scientists knew where to look, they began to find an almost limitless

variety of hydrothermal structures growing along the mid -Atlantic ridge.

They make possible a fantastic wilderness of life as rich as anywhere

It was very difficult to imagine that these structures were not created for

animals inside.

The bowls are so perfect to serve up the soup of bacteria for the shrimp to eat.

Everywhere we went, the geology was as if alive.

Massive structures growing not in millions of years, but almost before our

For years, almost every dive would produce more questions than answers.

Around almost every corner, another puzzle.

But after decades of exploration and study, some mysteries began to unfold.

At the center of the relationship between the animals and the flow of

from the chimneys are hundreds of species of specialized bacteria growing

rocks.

The bacteria use chemical energy from the hot water to produce nutrients

necessary to sustain their metabolism.

The shrimp grazing on the rocks use the bacteria as food.

For the shrimp, there is a fine line between a good solid meal and getting

burned alive.

The white shrimp at the top of this mound has burned off most of its

while grazing among the hot rocks.

What began as a curiosity in the Pacific has become a vast worldwide phenomenon.

Dozens of new sites have been explored throughout the mid -ocean ridge system.

Scientists were not expecting much of interest on the mid -Atlantic ridge.

What they found was the most fantastic event of them all.

the size and shape of a football stadium.

They dubbed it the Houston Astrodome.

Chemosynthetic bacteria, it turns out, were not just growing on the rocks, but

on the shrimps themselves.

coated in a slimy layer of bacteria, which they scrape off and eat.

The shrimp seem to fight for position in the hot water in order to feed their

coat of bacteria.

When scientists began to look beyond the obvious feeding patterns of the animals

and probe deeper into the chimney walls themselves,

they made perhaps the most astonishing discovery.

In total darkness, bathed in the poison breath of the inner earth, at 3

,500 pounds of pressure per square inch and temperatures exceeding 230 degrees

Fahrenheit, lives the microscopic hyperthermophile.

We did not even think to look here for life.

There is no harsher environment on Earth.

There is no creature more alien to us.

Yet as we journey down deeper among the molecules of its DNA,

We reached the four base chemicals of life's universal alphabet This is the

language of human DNA and in this we are most certainly related

There is a

good chance that this is where life began on earth and Here among the embers

that long ago dead star is where we began our journey 5 billion years ago.

With the discovery of microbes living in the vents, perhaps miles below the sea

floor, scientists began to consider that most of the biomass on Earth might well

live here.

beneath the volcanoes of the deep sea.

No one knows how or why a vent shuts off.

But here, where billions of creatures once thrived, all that remains are great

mounds of minerals.

Iron, zinc, silver, and gold, once spewed from the furnaces beneath.

There is little in this metallic desert to sustain life.

To survive here would require an entirely different strategy than a tube

clam, or a shrimp could muster.

While most scientists barely notice this place on their way to the hot spots

nearby,

Seilacher and Rona will search here, among the remnants of a dead volcano,

their mysterious crop circles of the deep.

and a creature that thrives where others cannot.

We looked in the area Peter calls the Valley of Paleodixia.

I was surprised that we should be looking where there was no obvious life,

that is perhaps the animal's secret.

I certainly had not expected to find so many.

They were all over the place by the thousands.

As soon as I got there and looked at the hexagon shape and the arrangement of

the holes, I knew this was my Paleodiction nodosum.

The creature is probably farming bacteria.

like the shrimp and the tube worms.

But unlike them, it must be very efficient because the nutrients are so

We had very little time left, so the sub -pilot went to work right away.

After all the trouble of finding them, collecting some samples would be fairly

easy.

A little bit more to the right.

Okay, start.

You're coming down. You look like you're right over it.

Come on down slowly.

Can you see it clearly?

Down, down there.

At last,

after eight hours in the sub and 50 years on the cliffs of Spain, We finally

the palaeodynsia.

It was a great moment.

We fully expected the creature to come swimming out at any moment.

But she did not.

Then we went in after it.

It was important for me that the tunnels would be there.

And the tunnels were there.

but not a creature in any of them.

Nothing.

There have been a dozen dives to the valley of the Paleodicteon over ten

They have not yet found the animal itself, but they have discovered its

They believe the creature is farming bacteria in its tunnels, and this

it to live frugally on the sparse chemical remnants.

of the dead volcano.

Because their tunnels match those on the cliffs of Spain, it suggests they have

outlived almost all other forms of life on Earth.

The important thing is that it is still alive and digging its wonderful burrows,

the same as the fossils I found 50 years ago on my honeymoon.

But she is very shy, and we have not seen her, and I probably never will.

But that is better, I think, because I can still imagine anything I want.

And my wife Edith would have been happy that I never found my mistress of the

deep.

As long as we have had eyes to see, we have gazed into the night sky and tried

to imagine what might be bathed in the light of distant stars.

We know now that the spirit of life also thrives in the darkness, among the

embers of the dead stars, and we must try to imagine that as well.