Question: What is so interesting in volcanoes

Jon Copley answered on 20 Jun 2010:

The undersea volcanoes where I work form a chain of mountains 40 000 miles long,which snakes all around our planet like the seam on a tennis ball. It’s our world’s longest mountain range, and the largest geological feature on Earth – but fifty years ago we had no idea that it was there, until people started to explore the deep ocean.

The eruptions of these undersea volcanoes (and they are erupting all the time) create the huge plates that make up the Earth’s crust. So we need to study these volcanoes to understand how the Earth works, and the geological processes that shape our world.

For example, you may know the continents of Europe and North America are moving apart very slowly (by a couple of centimetres per year, which is about the same rate our fingernails grow). Something must be filling the gap between them as they move apart – and that something is new crust, erupting as lava from the undersea volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic. But we don’t yet fully understand how that actually happens.

However, I’m not a geologist – I’m a biologist. And what’s interesting about these volcanoes in terms of biology is that there are colonies of marine life around them that are unlike anything we have ever seen before.

For starters, the deep-sea species down there don’t rely on sunlight as a source of energy to power their food chains. So when you read in your textbooks that “all life depends on the Sun as a source of energy”, that’s actually out-of-date, because of what we’ve discovered at these deep-sea volcanoes in the past 30 years.

And life on Earth may even have begun around similar deep-sea volcanoes, around four billion years ago. So if life can get started, and survive without sunlight, at deep-sea volcanoes on Earth, then maybe life could have got started, and still survive, at deep-sea volcanoes elsewhere in our Solar System. That may sound like science fiction, but from space probes it now looks like there may be an ocean, covered by ice, on Jupiter’s moon Europa – and there should be volcanoes at the bottom of that ocean. So NASA scientists are planning to send a probe there to look for life.

So thanks to what we’ve learned by studying undersea volcanoes on Earth, Europa now looks like the best place to go to answer one of the biggest questions in all science: “is there life elsewhere in the Universe?” (by the way, I don’t think we’ll find alien animals, or intelligent life, on Europa, but most likely organisms similar to the single-celled microbes that form the base of the food chain at undersea volcanoes on Earth. But you never know until you look…).

Meanwhile, back on Earth, I’m using the undersea volcanoes to figure out the patterns of life in the oceans, which we need to understand if we’re going to live sustainably on our planet for the future. The colonies of deep-sea creatures that we find around the volcanoes form “islands” of life on the ocean floor. Just as biologists like Darwin compared life on different islands to figure out the patterns of life on land, we’re doing the same thing beneath the waves to understand life in the oceans, which form our planet’s largest habitat.

And along the way, exploring life in the deep ocean has given us benefits for our everyday lives, from possible new medical treatments for some types of cancer thanks to chemicals in deep-sea creatures, to better fibre-optic cables for the internet, and even new washing powder that works at lower temperatures!

So that’s what interests me about undersea volcanoes – for me it’s not the volcanoes themselves, but the life around them: what that can tell us about about patterns of life on Earth, what it can give us to improve our medicine and advance our technology, and what it can perhaps tell us about life beyond Earth.