They're emptying the sample bottles that Alvin pilot BLee Williams filled today a mile and a half below the floating laboratory. They're trying to keep the acid, egg-smelly water off themselves. They're fumbling in the dark, trying to pin down answers to long-standing mysteries of oceanic chemistry. Oceanographers were wracking their brains over just these puzzles when they discovered volcanic vents in a ridge near the Galapagos Islands in 1977. Some of the answers, though, found blissful union.
Vent fluid comes boiling up out of the floor magnesium-free.
This percolation pattern also gave a mate to the question of the ridge's cold rock. Just as the water in your car's radiator circulates through the steel to carry off extra heat, so the water flowing through the ridge absorbs heat, then dumps it in the cold seawater. For a while, vents were considered to be fairly stable units of geochemistry. With its fresh face of shiny lava, its colicky disposition and growth spurts, it's demonstrating that much of what oceanographers knew about vents isn't exactly right. We realize we don't yet have a sense of how a vent system evolves.