Major Deep-Sea Smokers Found—"Evolution in Overdrive"

Deep under the North Atlantic, scientists have discovered a rare system of smoking volcanic vents and three-story "chimneys," according to scientists aboard the research vessel Celtic Explorer.

A hotbed of "evolution in overdrive," the site teems with strange animals that have been living there "perhaps for a millennium," said marine biologist Jon Copley. "And we're the first to see this place."

The vent field lies along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an undersea mountain range extending the length of the Atlantic that's created by the slow separation of tectonic plates.

The first hydrothermal vent zone to be explored on the ridge north of the Azores (map), the smoker site lies some 9,850 feet (3,000 meters) underwater, said expedition leader Andy Wheeler. (Read the deep-sea vent expedition blog.)

"It exists at the bottom of this steep, 650-foot [200-meter] fault escarpment." The teams remotely operated vehicle (ROV) "descended down the side of this cliff—and the side of the cliff was coated in bacterial slime—until we could see plumes of smoke coming up from below, and we found the chimneys reaching up," added Wheeler, a geologist at Ireland's University College, Cork.

Deep-sea chimneys are created when volcanically heated water carries metal sulfides up from below the seafloor. As the minerals pile up, the knobby towers take form.

Some of the study sites were so deep that the team's roughly SUV-size ROV—limited by its 3,000-meter (9,850-foot) tether to the ship—could investigate only chimney tops and cliff sides.

"We really were pushing the machines we had to the edge," said marine biologist Patrick Collins of the National University of Ireland. "And that's a credit to the ROV pilots—they pulled it off."

By the end of the ordeal, the researchers had christened the tower-spiked site Moytirra—"plain of the pillar"—after a battlefield of Irish myth.

Such pillars may someday be prized not only for their scientific richness but also for their ability to enrich corporate coffers, expedition leader Wheeler said.

"These chimneys, in many cases, have higher metal concentrations than some land-based ore reserves, so there is some economic interest," he said. "Some shallow-water examples are being looked at for potential deep-sea metal mining."

Such reserves might even be renewable, in a sense, because the chimneys grow over time, Wheeler added.
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Solar sails pick up speed

Two trials of spacecraft have successfully unfurled their solar sails, and demonstrated that radiation from sunlight can power them through interplanetary space.

Solar sails use photons from the Sun to propel spacecraft at high speeds. On 20 January, the small lightweight spacecraft NanoSail-D deployed a 10-square-metre gleaming sail in low-Earth orbit.

Shortly after, on 26 January, engineers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced the extension of their solar-sail mission IKAROS. Launched in May 2010, IKAROS flew past Venus in December last year, and the mission will continue until March 2012.

"Both of these are very good technological advances and help give confidence to solar sailing," says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization for space-based research based in Pasadena, California, that is hoping to launch its own solar sail by the end of the year.

Unlimited power

Solar sails are driven forwards when photons from the Sun strike their large, thin sheets, imparting a small force. Unlike other propulsion methods, which require a spacecraft to carry fuel, the power source of a solar sail is essentially unlimited. Because they experience no friction in space, solar sails build up a great deal of thrust, and researchers hope that they could eventually be used to reach other planets or even other stars.

In contrast to IKAROS, NanoSail-D was designed to travel closer to home. Launched into low-Earth orbit, it will experience drag on the sail as it skims the planet's upper atmosphere. Within a few months, the spacecraft should slow sufficiently to re-enter and burn up. The technology could one day be attached to decommissioned satellites to slow them down and assist in de-orbiting, says Dean Alhorn, an engineer at NASA's Marshal Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and principal investigator of the NanoSail-D mission.
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