A new ecosystem has been discovered in the depths of the Pacific Ocean

In the depths of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Central America, a new marine ecosystem has been discovered by an international team of scientists, who, thanks to the help of a robot, have managed to shed light on what is found in the cavities located under the hydrothermal vents of an underwater volcano.It is right there, precisely at 2,500 meters deep, that the ecosystem is hidden, teeming with worms, snails and bacteria chemosynthetics that live in water at a temperature of 25 degrees centigrade.A discovery of fundamental importance, which gives new certainties to our knowledge of the marine world:now, in fact, the presence of habitats around the hydrothermal springs existing in the great sea depths has been substantially certified, a hypothesis that until now could not be taken for granted.A discovery which also calls us to question the importance of preserving the oceans, precisely at a time when more and more countries are embarking on deep-sea exploration projects for the extraction of minerals.

Scientists have spent the last 46 years studying hydrothermal vents and microbial life underground, but they have never looked for animals beneath these volcanic hot springs."we read about it in a communicated of the Schmidt Ocean Institute (the institute that favored the research), which is no coincidence defines 30-day shipping is “historic”. which scientists carried out thanks to his research vessel “Falkor”.

Apparently tiring work, but which in the end generated the results mentioned thanks to the collaboration of scientists from the most disparate countries, namely the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Costa Rica and Slovenia.Furthermore, the latter have found evidence that leads us to think that the so-called tube worms move through hydrothermal vents with the aim of colonizing new habitats:these are animals typical of hydrothermal springs, even if until now "very few of their young had been found in the waters above the hydrothermal vents".The team of experts hypothesizes that the animals can move beneath the seabed with the aim of creating new hydrothermal communities, which moreover form in a relatively short time.“When a new hydrothermal vent appears, the ecosystem forms rapidly as animals colonize the area within a few years,” states the Schmidt Ocean Institute, specifying how the team was “the first to examine and confirm that tube larvae they can settle and even live beneath the seabed.”

Hydrothermal vents are fractures in the Earth's surface from which geothermally heated water escapes which are also commonly found in the deep sea:near volcanically active areas, in areas where the tectonic plates are moving, in ocean ridges or in hot spots in the earth's crust.

«Our understanding of animal life in deep-sea hydrothermal vents has significantly expanded with this discovery», declared the doctor at the head of the expedition, Monika Bright, underlining how having found «a new ecosystem, hidden under another ecosystem, provide new evidence that life exists in unexpected places».Obviously, however, what emerged from the expedition represents only the tip of the iceberg, which is why the president and co-founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute - Wendy Schmidt - specified that discoveries of this kind "strengthen the urgency to fully explore the ocean so that we know what exists in the deep sea."There is still a lot to discover "about our Ocean", the president of the institute also stated, underlining "how important it is to protect what we do not yet know or understand".

It will be enough to remember that according to the Schmidt Ocean Institute Such ecosystems “could be vulnerable to deep-sea mining”, which moreover seems capable of causing the most disparate damage to marine ecosystems.The good news is that international deep-sea mining has been booming in recent weeks blocked from the ISA (the International Seabed Authority), although the green light for extraction processes could arrive in the near future.Yet such activities should be banned based on what scientists have communicated, according to which on the one hand they should be banned preventatively protect the oceans and on the other hand they should conduct more and more research on it:only in this way will we be able to have greater information on the seabed and consequently protect the oceans more effectively, which evidently we currently only know superficially about.

[by Raffaele De Luca]