Question: Have you found anything interesting?

Jon Copley answered on 16 Jun 2010:

I think so (though perhaps not everyone would agree that it is “interesting”)! So far this year, my team has found the world’s deepest undersea volcanic vents, where water appears to be gushing out so hot and under such pressure that it doesn’t seem to behave like water any more. Instead, it could be a new state of “water” – not really liquid, but not ice, or steam either – that we don’t really understand yet, called “supercritical water”. But we have to do some more tests first to be sure.

Over the past two years, my colleagues and I have also found around 30 new species of animals. By comparing them with other species elsewhere in the oceans, we’re trying to figure out what is behind the patterns of life in the oceans, which are our planet’s largest habitat.

And we’ve found a new crater on the ocean floor near Antarctica, with a small volcano in it, where the geology and chemistry is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Hopefully that will tell us more about how our planet works – and the geological processes that shape our world – as we study it further.