Remember that when I had started graduate school just a few years before, it was still widely believed that there weren\u2019t hydrothermal vents in the Atlantic. We knew that wasn\u2019t true, but I wondered how many hydrothermal fields there were on this planet, and what were the most efficient ways of searching for them.<\/p>\n

I realized that although a vent itself is typically only about the size of a football field, the plume coming out of it is like a mushroom cloud that rises into the water column and expands. Even after getting diluted by a factor of 10,000, the concentrations of iron, manganese and other metals are still 100 times greater than in ordinary seawater. We could find evidence of these plumes without doing any chemical measurements simply by using optical sensors to measure the cloudiness of the water. And because of the way the plumes spread, these features could sometimes be detected from hundreds of kilometers away.<\/p>\n

After finishing my postdoc in 1990, I returned to the U.K., taking a job at the National Institute of Oceanography in the village of Wormley. I no longer had access to a submarine like Alvin<\/em>, but a group at the institute had just developed a towable instrument that used sonar to map the seafloor. I said that if we put my optical sensors on that vehicle, I could figure out where all the hydrothermal activity is.<\/p>\n

The first time we used this approach, we found six new vent sites in the Atlantic, where only two had previously been known. It was no longer a matter of stumbling upon things by accident; we could go about it systematically.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/br><\/br><\/br><\/p>\n