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This satellite image shows what lies beneath the Pacific Ocean floor, several kilometers deep, where tectonic plates meet. Where there are volcanoes, mountains rise and volcanic activity occurs constantly.
This is not only caused by sudden and powerful eruptions. Magma deep in the planet heats up groundwater and in some places rushes upward in the form of hot "fountains" - hydrothermal vents. It is also called a black smoker, because in fact it looks like black smoke. There is a lot of volcanic material in the water.
These hot springs have been observed since the 1970s and were first discovered on the Galapagos Islands. It turns out that this is a real oasis of the underwater world. This provides a warm and nutritious environment. There is also a version that it was around the "black smokers" that the first life on Earth originated.
The large number of worms and mollusks living nearby has long intrigued scientists, and they recently decided to investigate what was happening under the seabed. Until now, it was generally accepted that nothing but microscopic life forms such as viruses and microorganisms could live in tectonic space. Now it turns out that this is at least not entirely true.
Using remote control technology, marine biology researchers recently drilled a 2.5-kilometer-deep hole in the Pacific Ocean floor at a mid-ocean ridge intersection near the Galapagos Islands. And when they lifted a piece of rock, a whole new world opened up. It turned out that below the bottom are pits filled with water from hydrothermal vents, and that these pools are home to some truly enormous creatures: a tube worm called Riftia pachyptila, also known as the giant bearded eagle. It can grow up to 3 meters long.
They stay with their smaller relatives, such as mussels and snails. The entire ecosystem. Biologists have questions. How did they all get there? It is assumed that with the complex circulation of water through cracks in the bottom layer, the larvae of giant worms can be transferred into these openings. That is, the reservoir is not "completely" closed and has some interaction with the ocean. But the most important conclusion of this discovery is the following. We still know very little about how big the Earth's biosphere really is and what life forms are capable of in general.