Question: what's the most interesting thing you've found out from the work you do?

Jon Copley answered on 20 Jun 2010:

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 a lot more tests yet 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 last year we 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.

Before that, I spent some time figuring out that some species of deep-sea creatures still follow the “seasons” in their life cycles, even though there aren’t any seasons where they live (conditions seem the same all year round, because they live far beyond the reach of sunlight).

This matters because it shows us there are actually connections that we didn’t know about between the sunlit world up here (with its seasons), and even the most remote and distant corners of the deep ocean.

So that tells us that any changes that we make to patterns of life up here (such as through climate change) can still have an impact far below in the dark deep ocean. There really is nowhere to hide – whether from climate change, or from a disaster such as an asteroid hitting the Earth and the dust from that impact blocking out the sunlight.

That appears to have happened 65 million years ago, and it killed off the dinosaurs. People have suggested that the life at the undersea volcanoes that I study would not have been affected by that impact (because the life there doesn’t rely on sunlight as an immediate form of energy). But my work on seasons in the life cycles of animals down there suggests that some species would still have been affected, because they have links to the sunlit world above that we hadn’t realised before. And we’re still trying to understand exactly what those links are, and what they mean for understanding the patterns of life in the oceans today.