Question: What made you want to explore undersea volcanoes?

Jon Copley answered on 21 Jun 2010:

I was studying zoology at university, and learning all about the different types of animal life on Earth. One day I was walking through the library, and I saw a book with a picture on its cover of a bizarre-looking worm-like animal. I couldn’t even tell what kind of animal it was, despite having had lectures about all the different types of animals.

Because the picture wasn’t like any animal I’d seen before, I got the book out and started to read it. I found out that the animal in the picture was a “tubeworm” that lives in colonies around undersea volcanoes. I was fascinated, because we’d not been told anything in any of our lectures about animals like the “tubeworm”, or the colonies of creatures discovered in the deep ocean that can survive without using sunlight as an immediate source of energy.

And that blew me away – I’d always been taught, at school, that all life on Earth depended on the Sun as a source of energy, with plants using sunlight to grow and so forming the base of all food chains. But here was a recent discovery in the deep ocean that broke those rules – and that made me wonder just what else might be waiting to be discovered down there. And that made me want to explore the undersea volcanoes, to look for more new species of deep-sea creatures.