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Credit: Ken Mallory
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Peter Rona, professor of marine science and geological sciences, led the discovery and exploration of deep-sea hot springs and the associated ecosystem of new life forms on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1985. Over the next two decades, Rona has logged time in just about every deep-ocean submersible – the Russian Mir vessels, the Japanese Shinkai subs, the famous Alvin and others. From 1999 to 2003, Rona and Rutgers colleague Richard Lutz were scientific advisers to the producers of “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” an IMAX movie chronicling deep-sea exploration of hydrothermal vents. At last year’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Rona and colleagues convened sessions to showcase discoveries of hot springs and their other-worldly ecosystems in the deep Arctic, Indian and South Atlantic oceans opened up by their Atlantic expeditions. Focus writer Ken Branson spoke recently with Rona about his sea adventures.
Question: What drew you to the study of the ocean bottom?
Answer: I was one of those kids who collected rocks and minerals, climbed mountains, loved the outdoors and identified with geology from early on. I pursued a path to explore the oceans, the last frontier on Earth, starting as an apprentice in a laboratory at Columbia University that studied the physics of sound in the sea. Going to sea for nine months of the year, I was hooked.
Question: What do we know about deep-sea hydrothermal processes and ocean ridge systems that we didn’t know, say, 20 years ago?
Answer: Our Atlantic discovery transformed our understanding of sea floor hot springs and their impact on the Earth from regional to global. This was a breakthrough, because the consensus of the scientific community at that time was that such hot springs could only occur in the volcanically more active Pacific. We now know that hot springs can occur anywhere on the ocean ridge system, a submerged volcanic mountain range that extends some 60,000 kilometers through all the ocean basins of the world. The hot springs on ocean ridges play a major role in cooling the Earth’s interior, in exchanging chemicals between the sea floor and the ocean in quantities that modulate ocean composition, and in concentrating metallic mineral deposits. The sea floor hot springs also supply chemical energy used by heat-loving microbes as primary producers at the base of an ecosystem where life may have begun, largely independent of photosynthesis that supports life at the base of the terrestrial ecosystem.
Question: What are the practical applications of this knowledge?
Answer: Enzymes in certain of these microbes already are being used in detergents, food preservatives, to replicate DNA (polymerase chain reaction used in DNA finger-printing), to enhance the flow of deep oil wells, and new uses are emerging. Bioactive compounds produced by the microbes show promise for medical and pharmaceutical applications. The metallic mineral deposits concentrated by sea floor hot springs and uplifted onto land in the geologic past have been mined as sources of base and precious metals since pre-Classical times. The active sea floor deposits provide natural laboratories to advance understanding of ore-forming processes, to guide exploration for the ancient deposits on land, and are themselves resources for the future.
Question: You and your colleague Rich Lutz were science advisers to “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” the IMAX movie that took viewers down to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge with you. How has that affected your life and work?
Answer: We brought Hollywood lighting and camera technology to the deep sea-floor to clearly illuminate for the first time the spectacular hot springs and their strange ecosystems for the public to see, from school children to the delegates to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The images are aiding my research on how flow from the hot springs disperses heat and chemicals that affect the ocean environment. And I now have students in my classes drawn to Rutgers by this inspiring film.
Question: You’ve been in submersibles, thousands of feet down. What is it like to be in one?
Answer: Cramped and cold – but wonderful, just the same. The submersible is a metal sphere no wider than your outstretched arms, and usually accommodates three people along with lots of equipment. The metal is an efficient conductor of heat, so within a short time the temperature inside the sub is about the same as that on a winter day in New Brunswick. A typical dive lasts about 10 hours. The discomfort is quickly lost in the sheer fascination of being there.
Question: What do you do for fun?
Answer: What on Earth could be more fun than exploring the oceans?
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