Scientists could be on the brink of a scientific breakthrough about how life originates after drilling deeper into the Earth than ever before.
The record-breaking study unearthed a long section of rocks from the Earth’s mantle – the layer of solid rock between the planet’s inner core and outer crust.
They drilled the over 4,000-foot-long rock core from a spot in the Atlantic Ocean called the ‘Lost City Hydrothermal Field,’ or more commonly, the ‘Lost City.’
Their findings, presented in the journal Science, offer a closer look at the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge in the depths of the ocean.
Scientists have extracted a huge sample of the Earth’s mantle after drilling the deeper into the planet than ever before.
With further analysis, the rocks will help answer questions about the origins of life on Earth, and how the mantle drives volcanic activity and important global cycles, according to the researchers.
Led by researchers from the Universities of Cardiff and Leeds, the scientists traveled to the Lost City – a point about 1,500 miles east of South Florida – and extracted a mantle rock core from a nearby site.
The Lost City lies along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is one of the world’s largest undersea mountain ranges at a length of 6,200 miles.
Despite what the name suggests, the Lost City isn’t the site of a sunken Atlantis. It’s actually a ‘bizarre’ hydrothermal vent system where seawater circulates beneath the seafloor.
The researchers drilled their core near the ‘Lost City,’ a system of hydrothermal vents that lies along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
It caught the attention of scientists because it produces vents up to 18 stories tall – the tallest ever seen – and the fluids forming these vents are heated by seawater reacting with million-year-old mantle rocks.
That may not sound as exciting as a mysterious civilization lost to the ocean, but these vents are massively important as they could hold secrets about how life emerged on our planet billions of years ago, experts say.
‘The reaction between seawater and mantle rocks on or near the seafloor releases hydrogen, which in turn forms compounds such as methane, which underpin microbial life,’ said study lead author Johan Lissenberg, a geologist at Cardiff University.
‘This is one of the hypotheses for the origin of life on Earth.’
Lead researcher Johan Lissenberg from Cardiff University and two colleagues analyze the mantle rock sample. Their early findings have already been surprising.
The researchers drilled into mantle rock 2,800 feet below the ocean surface using equipment aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution.
They recovered large sections of continuous mantle rocks, which should be sample representative of the mantle rock beneath the Lost City vents, the researchers said.
‘The recovery is record-breaking in that previous attempts of drilling mantle rocks have been difficult, with penetration no deeper than 200 meters (656 feet) and with relatively low recovery of rocks,’ Lissenberg said.
He and his colleagues documented how a mineral called olivine in the core sample had reacted with seawater at various temperatures.
Studying this reaction and others between seawater and mantle rock minerals could help scientists understand how microbial life first formed in the depths of the ocean, Lissenberg explained.
The researchers also made some surprising early discoveries about the core sample’s composition – finding a more extensive period of melting (molten rick) than expected.
