"This submarine is setting out to explore the floor of the Atlantic Ocean." "Until recently what lay at the bottom was a complete mystery." "But there, under thousands of meters of water, lies the key to how the surface of our planet was created." "The story of how the sea floor gave up its secret began nearly 100 years ago " "on dry land." "The first clues came from looking at the shape of the continents." "Ever since the first accurate maps were made it had been noticed that if you were to push the coast of South Africa here up against the coast of South America" "7,000 kilometers away they'd fit snugly together." "At the turn of the century a young German scientist," "Alfred Wegener, decided to find out whether this fit was just coincidence or whether the two continents had once been connected." "Wegener needed solid evidence to support this extraordinary idea." "He began by comparing the rocks on either side of the Atlantic Ocean." "Table Mountain is one of the most familiar landmarks in South Africa and it's the field area of geologist" "Maarten de Wit." "What's great about being on top of Table Mountain here is that we have a fantastic vantage point from which to understand some of the evidence that Wegener put together and here we are at the very western extremity of the Cape mountains that stretch" "to the east of us 2,000 kilometers but here it is abruptly truncated by the Atlantic Ocean, and the next time we see it again is across that vast stretch of ocean in Argentina in South America." "You go to South America and you see exactly the same thing, same structure, same rocks, everything." "The Cape fault belt stops here, starts again south of Buenos Aires." "Those two bits of information essentially allows you to close that Atlantic Ocean." "And when you close that Atlantic Ocean, those two pieces of mountain belt formulate one huge long mountain chain." "More evidence that the continents had once been joined came from looking at the fossil record." "The fossil of one particular plant caught Wegener's attention." "This is glossopteris." "It's a kind of fir tree, early fir tree." "You can see how very exceptionally well some of these fossils are preserved." "It's widely found not only here but at that time was also found in, in places like India, Madagascar and Australia and later on even in Antarctica," "South America, so they were very widely distributed in these 300 million-year-old rocks and Wegener used that idea to argue what would have been very difficult for these fossils to float across huge expanses of ocean." "Rather than that he, he argued it would be easier to explain if all these continents were together as one huge land mass." "As they scoured the rocks of far-flung continents geologists found more and more examples of plants and animal fossils that looked like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle." "Wegener collected as much of this evidence as he could from around the globe." "When he put the pieces together he was forced to the astonishing conclusion:" "all the dry land on the planet must once have been part of a single land mass, a super-continent he named Pangea." "He suggested that over millions of years," "Pangea split apart." "New oceans opened up where land had once existed." "He called this idea continental drift." "Unfortunately not many people took to the idea." "The trouble was that Wegener couldn't explain how the gigantic blocks of the continents could sail through the solid rock of the ocean floor and without a plausible mechanism behind it most people ignored continental drift." "And it remained ignored, until new evidence began to emerge from exploration of the seas." "This is the maiden voyage of the research ship Atlantis." "Its destination is the middle of the Atlantic Ocean." "On board is a team of scientists intent on unravelling the secrets hidden beneath the water." "Among them is marine geologist, Joe Cann." "Wegener's ideas were very controversial when they first came out and a lot of people dismissed them." "They knew there had to be ways of getting animals and plants from one continent to another, because you had these astonishing similarities, especially in the Southern Hemisphere." "But they couldn't bring themselves to think that the continents were drifting." "Instead, there was a very strong feeling that the earth was heaving in some periodic way." "That there were mountain belts rose and fell." "And that pulsing idea led to people thinking that the ocean floor might rise, to allow the animals to wander across, and sink again." "An undulation of the ocean floor from time to time." "It seems very implausible now, but that's how they felt about it." "And that meant, of course, that the ocean floor had to be the same as the continental crust." "It had to look the same and you'd expect the same sorts of rocks, the same sort of materials to make it up." "But of course nobody knew for sure what the ocean floor was made of because they couldn't see it." "It took a change in world politics to reveal the first hints of what really lay below." "And away she goes." "And in a matter of months..." "During the Cold War submarine warfare became vitally important." "...and a number of submarines are named after statesmen and military..." "Nuclear submarines had to be able to navigate the world's oceans safely." "So sub-mariners needed to be sure of the depth of the sea floor." "Flush with navy funding, scientists set out to map the ocean floor in unprecedented detail." "Their tool was the echo sounder." "Ships sent out pulses of sound which travelled to the sea floor and then bounced back up again." "The time taken for each ping to make the journey gave the depth of the water at that point." "We've basically been using the same types of precision depth recorders since the end of the Second World War." "As you can see on this, on this record from, from the 1950s, basically you can see that the bottom is a very fine trace here, very strong fine trace." "But there are also places where the echo sounder record gets very, very confused and in those areas you have to be very careful to interpret them correctly." "One of the first people to do this and who was an expert at it was Bruce Heezen and his colleague Marie Tharp." "And they were able to take these echo grams and make maps from them that allowed us to understand what the bottom of the ocean really looked like." "Heezen and Tharp were masters of the echo sounder trace." "Methodically piecing together the data from ships' tracks that criss-crossed the oceans." "Forty years on Marie Tharp is retired, but still lives in the house where she once worked on the data." "This exquisite hand-drawn map was the result." "Considering the scarity of the data in those days, the detail is astounding." "Where we had a track we took it very seriously and exactly, but then it'd be so far to the next track that we had to do a bit of inspired guessing to fill in the space." "That's why the (NAME) quill pen and the sketching technique was such a handy device 'cos you could be very accurate where you had data and you could make up and guess where you didn't have data" "and still keep the same style." "Actually in this area we didn't have any data at all, so that's why we put the title in there." "When they put the echo soundings together" "Bruce and Marie revealed the existence of a vast mountain chain, running down the centre of the North Atlantic." "As more data became available they found that this range of submarine mountains snaked its way around the entire globe for 60,000 kilometers." "Bruce and Marie decided to publicise their discovery, but the reaction wasn't quite what they'd hoped." "Amazement at first, very shocking amazement and then doubt and then finally scorn." "You know it was a, a shocking thing to say." "To make matters worse," "Marie told Bruce about something odd she'd found on the crest of the ridge, something which supported Wegener's controversial idea." "This is profiles across the Atlantic Ocean from our echo sounder." "One thing which was unique to this preset of transatlantic profiles was this valley at the crest of the mid-Atlantic Ridge." "You see it, there is one mare and here's a cleft in the middle here" "I showed it to my boss, Bruze Heezen and I had plotted the position of this rift valley along the centre of the ocean where it occurs and he just groaned and groaned and says "this can't be," "it looks just like Continental Drift"" "because you could spot it was a big cleft that's quite a large valley inside of a huge ridge." "It was a big crack as if it could possibly mean that the continents were pulling apart." "Marie sketched the valley into the map of the North Atlantic, but it didn't end there." "She and Bruce went on to map all of the world's oceans, giving geologists their first view of the submarine world." "Over the course of 20 years, since this initial map was made by Bruce and Marie, they've dedicated their lives to looking at all of the echo sounding records that have been collected to produce a global map" "that shows us what the bottom of the ocean floor looks like." "And this map is, really provides the geologist with a complete understanding of the how different the ocean floor is from the continents." "The ridge system runs down the middle of the Atlantic Basin, between Africa and Europe and North America and South America and it's this continuous line of rugged topography that goes all the way down the ocean basins." "Here into the Indian Ocean and out into the Pacific Ocean here, it is continuous throughout the globe." "Now you don't see that on the continents" "You can see mountain ranges and sometimes they're continuous, but never for 60,000 kilometers." "You don't see that type of feature on the continent." "Today at last satellite technology can reveal directly the shape of the ocean floor." "Remove the skin of water and the backbone of the world can be seen from space." "The discovery of this vast mid-ocean ridge system was a revelation but nobody knew how it had got there." "Then, as people began to look more closely at the sea floor, more striking differences between the oceans and the continents began to emerge." "At the end of the Second World War, there was a new breed of marine scientist, and they set out to study the ocean floor by dropping explosives over the side of the ship - and they had plenty of those " "and listening to them with hydrophones that had been used for submarine detection." "The technique was called seismic profiling." "In the early days it was a fairly hazardous enterprise." "Explosives were simply hurled overboard and detonated." "The shock waves penetrated deep into the rock beneath the ocean." "By studying the way the sound was reflected back, the ocean-going geologists measured the thickness of the ocean crust." "When they did this, they discovered two very important things." "One was, that the ocean crust was much thinner than the continental crust, six kilometers instead of 30 kilometers and the other is, that the ocean crust has the same thickness and the same structure all the way round the world" "which indicated it formed by the same process all the way round the world." "That was a truly fundamental discovery." "The seismic research helped scientists come to realise a crucial fact" "the ocean floor and the continents looked so different they had to have been created in entirely different ways." "But the process that created the ocean basins remained a mystery until another technique began picking up important clues." "It's midnight." "The research vessel Atlantis is approaching the centre of the mid-Atlantic ridge and Joe Cann is supervising the launch of a dredge bucket." "Over the next couple of hours the dredge will be lowered thousands of meters until it touches bottom, then dragged along as the ship creeps forward." "In the process, the bucket should scoop up some of the rocks that litter the sea floor." "Bridge, we're going to put another 30 meters of wire out." "Right, 15." "10 maybe." "OK." "The problems are that we've got, we're in 2,500 meters of water - and we've got a dredge being pulled over a rocky bottom with unknown rocks, some of which are pretty tough rocks." "The ship is going along at half a knot inexorably." "What we must avoid is, is being snagged up on a rock down there." "If we get snagged up and don't notice it, the tension will build up in the wire." "The wire parts." "It parts on deck." "Loose end whips around, cause a lot of damage, kills people." "In the old days we didn't know whether the ship was moving over the bottom at all." "We could put wire out - we didn't know whether the dredge was on the bottom." "We didn't know where the bottom was properly and we had to resort to very crude techniques such as - when the dredge was out- we would sit on the main warp on the after deck feeling the nubbles" "coming up from the deep ocean floor." "It's very evocative - it's very, very..." "Uncomfortable, I would have thought" "It was very uncomfortable, very dangerous but you felt in touch with the ocean floor like you don't at the present day." "You felt deeply in touch with it, through your bottom." "I have a dredge in sight, dredge in sight." "Dredger in sight" "Up easy." "There are certainly rocks in there." "I mean, you can see the bottom of the bag bulging." "First one for the new ship." "That's impressive." "Oh yes, oh yes." "When scientists began recovering rocks from around the mid ocean ridge, they found they were mainly volcanic." "These aren't the kind of things that you see in your back garden at home." "They're basalts." "They're also submarine basalts." "You can tell 'cos they chill to this bright, glassy margin chilled against the water when they erupted." "And they're very sharp." "The glass is very young and very sharp - as you can see, I've cut my finger on the fragment." "These rocks are young." "Somewhere, 2000 meters below, submarine volcanoes have recently been erupting." "We know they're young, because of the fresh glass and they're also highly magnetic." "If I take my compass out, it's just an ordinary compass that you use any day," "I take one of these rocks and bring it up to it, you see, if you look carefully that the needle deflects a bit." "Not much, about 10 degrees." "But it deflects enough to show that the rock must be very magnetic indeed." "Here we go." "Scientists were still perplexed about what was going on down there." "But once they realised ocean rocks could be magnetic, it opened up a new avenue of investigation." "OK It's in the water now." "That's a magnetometer and it is towed behind the ship." "It's an instrument that gives us a very detailed reading of the earth's magnetic field, so it's very, very sensitive." "Basically, it can pick up the small variations in the earth's magnetic field that are caused by the rocks in the various layers in the ocean crust." "Magnetometer surveys started in earnest in the 1950s, often in extraordinary detail." "Certain areas were sailed over in a series of tightly-packed parallel lines to ensure that nothing was missed out." "Where the ships went, magnetometers followed behind." "Magnetic rocks distort the earth's magnetic field, sometimes making it stronger than expected, sometimes weaker." "These differences are called positive and negative anomalies." "When the data from the first detailed survey were put together, the scientists were dumbfounded by the result." "Stripes of magnetic anomalies." "Now this was back in 1961 the most amazing thing." "Here's the coast of the United States." "Here's Canada, and here is the magnetic anomaly map offshore." "Black is positive anomalies, white is negative anomalies and see how they're all form these astonishing stripes." "Nothing like this has ever been seen on the continents." "And yet the ocean floor appeared to be made of these parallel stripes of positive and negative anomalies." "By the early '60s scientists knew a good deal about the ocean floor, but none of it made much sense." "In some ways it was a very uniform picture." "The crust was all the same thickness, it was all much younger than the continents and it was nearly all made of volcanic rock." "Also, running down the centre of the basins, was a continuous mountain range and along the crest was a continuous rift valley." "This pattern was so radically different from anything on the continents that it demanded an explanation." "The turning point finally came in 1962, at a lecture given here in Cambridge which revived Wegener's idea of continental drift." "Attending the lecture was Fred Vine, who was just a geology student at the time, but his interest in the subject had been triggered long before." "I first encountered the concept of continental drift in a school text book when I was about 14." "And I opened the text book, and I think it was right at the very beginning, the first page of the first chapter pretty well, where it showed a fit of South America and Africa, the classic sort of fit of the continents," "and it said that it was - some people thought that these continents may once have been juxtaposed in this way and have drifted apart." "But no-one really knew." "And it has never been proved or disproved." "And I thought that this was just incredible." "I mean incredible to think that this may of once been the case and it may have happened, so that the whole scale of it you know, the mechanism of it was mind boggling." "The other thing that I just couldn't really cope with was that nobody knew one way or the other, and I felt it was just time that we found out." "I mean there must be some way of finding out such a fundamental fact about the earth." "The birth of the oceans is still a matter of some conjecture." "At that lecture in 1962" "Fred Vine listened to an American geologist Harry Hess." "Hess explained his ideas of how the ocean basins had formed." "It's a lecture Vine remembers vividly today." "Hess I guess was the first person to try to synthesize all the new data." "It was a pretty daring synthesis anyway and it was regarded as being very speculative at the time." "I thought it was very exciting because it fitted in with continental drift." "Hess believed the mid ocean ridge was a vast crack where the Earth was splitting apart." "He suggested molten rock was constantly erupting in the crack, continuously forming new ocean floor." "Hess was basically describing an enormous conveyor belt with new ocean crust forming at the mid ocean ridge and then moving away." "It explained almost all the observations:" "the ridge and its valley, the consistent layer of young volcanic rock." "And it also explained continental drift." "The continents didn't sail through the oceanic rock, they just moved with it." "It was an extraordinary idea." "Hess himself called it geo-poetry." "Ironically the one line of evidence that could make it stand up was the very element Hess left out:" "magnetism." "And it just so happened that magnetism of ocean rocks was the subject of Fred Vine's PhD." "Well, this is the very room in which I worked as a graduate student and it's the first time I've been back in 35 years, so it's rather fun." "It's exactly the same essentially." "I came here in October 1962 to work with Drummond Matthews, who was a geologist." "Drummond at the time was actually at sea making a detailed survey of the north-west Indian Ocean and this involved measuring the shape of the ocean floor, the gravity field over it and the magnetic field over it and I was specifically" "as his first graduate student actually, to work on the magnetic data." "I decided that the way to go about this problem was to use a digital computer - this is Edzac 2 one of the very few in the world at that time." "I don't think I'm actually in this queue but I could be because I think it was every hour for about 5 minutes we were allowed to test our programmes on, on the computer." "Vine had a programme that analysed the magnetic anomalies." "He entered magnetic data from the survey into the computer." "It then calculated what sort of magnetic field could cause the anomalies that had been measured." "What the computer told Vine was quite astonishing" "The all important result that it came up with - and it was a rather surprising result in many ways - was that large areas of the survey, large areas of the ocean floor in that survey area were reversely magnetized." "That is that it's as though the rocks had been magnetized at a time when the earth's magnetic field was the reverse of its present direction, that, that a compass at that time would have pointed to the south" "rather than to north, geographic pole." "The theory that the Earth's magnetic field has repeatedly flipped to and fro had been hotly debated for years." "No consensus had been reached, but if magnetic reversals had really happened they would have left their mark." "As volcanic rock erupts and then cools it records the direction of the Earth's magnetic field at the time of the eruption." "If the magnetic field flipped such reversals would remain captured in the rocks." "It was really simply a matter of combining that with Harry hes's idea of sea-floor spreading." "I mean Harry painted this picture of conveyor belt, this running out symmetrically on either side of the mid-ocean ridge what in effect was to convert the conveyor belt into a tape-recorder, a sort of twin-headed tape-recorder running out symmetrically." "Vine's idea was that if the Earth's field would make compasses point north, then any molten rock erupting at the ridge at that time would be magnetized in that direction." "If the Earth's field then flipped, any more new rock formed at the ridge would be magnetized in the new direction." "Each time the magnetic field flipped, so would the magnetization of the newly-forming crust." "But since nobody had irrefutable evidence of magnetic reversals, the idea went down like a lead balloon." "It was not generally accepted particularly by people who were closest to, to the field actually." "I suppose an element, you know it was, it was a wild idea or seemed, thought to be a wild idea and it wasn't their idea so why believe it, but one can find quite a lot of references" "in the literature in 64/65 where people were really quite rude about it actually." "It didn't bother me particularly but..." "Fortunately, the hypothesis also made a prediction." "It predicted that the pattern of magnetic stripes on either side of the mid ocean ridge would be symmetrical." "So Vine looked carefully at the map of magnetic stripes from the Pacific Ocean." "Once he knew what he was looking for, he found the symmetry staring him in the face." "This stripe of positively magnetized rock actually marks a section of the ridge." "On either side the pattern of white and black stripes stretches out in a mirror image." "Incredibly the symmetry in this diagram was not realised until 1965, that the survey had been extance at 1961 and no-one had noticed the symmetry about what we now call the (NAME) ridge." "Now people began to believe Vine and they started to find symmetrical patterns in other data." "The theory of sea floor spreading had been tested and proved." "With it, Alfred Wegener's idea of continental drift took on a new lease of life." "At last it was possible to understand how continents could drift slowly but inexorably across the face of the planet." "But at the heart of the theory lay a feature that no-one had ever set eyes on the remarkable volcanic mountain chain where oceanic crust is generated, the mid Atlantic Ridge." "Geologists would never be satisfied until they had seen it for themselves." "After 6 days straight sail from Bermuda, the Atlantis is sitting directly on top of the ridge." "But a different vessel is needed to make the final leg of the journey:" "to the ocean floor." "This is a submersible "Alvin"" "capable of diving to forty-five hundred meters, which is roughly three miles deep under the ocean." "It withstands pressures of up to sixty-six hundred PSI, which is about two good sized elephants sitting on your lap." "The titanium sphere is about two inches thick and inside it sit three people, the pilot and two observers." "It gets a little thicker up by the view ports, it's about three and half inches thick." "The view ports are made of plastic so that they're tough and not brittle like glass would be." "Alvin dives by being loaded with weights." "When it's ready to surface the weights are dumped and the sub becomes light enough to float up." "If the submarine was to be stuck on the bottom for some reason, snagged on a, anything, the releasing of weights might not be enough." "So the submarine can try to drive up with its thrusters and if that's not enough, we could drop various pieces of gear, we can release the science basket - get rid of the science gear." "We can release the manipulators." "We can even try jettisoning our batteries, which would then leave us without power." "If all that's not enough, we can last on the bottom for three days and, if there's no prospect of rescue, we can actually release the sphere from the rest of the submarine and it will float up on its own." "Unfortunately, it won't float up right side up." "We don't really know exactly how fast or in what attitude." "It'll probably spin like a ball and it - might be quite a wild ride." "Matt, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about where we are planning on diving tomorrow." "So if you turn on that light for a second, thanks." "So we've got this big sea mound in the middle of the Rift Valley, the place where we are going to dive is right here on the summit." "It's an area where..." "The evening before the dive, project leader Dan Fornari finalizes details with Susan Humphris, the scientist who will be on board the sub." "Matt Heintz has been chosen as pilot." "So you're not talking more than a kilometer in any direction that you'll have to travel." "Right slow Yes, so I think the thing do maybe is to start in here and then work our way up the slope where the dredge went." "It looks like there might some sort of fairly steep cliff or scarp here that we'll have to go up, you know, it looks like it might be about 100 meters high." "Got propulsion..." "Hydraulics on." "Good, good." "Good luck." "Thanks." "At first, when you get in the sub, because it's been sitting out on deck, it's usually very, very hot and stuffy." "And the first impression is one of being incredibly cramped." "We standing by on the fan tail, ready to launch." "Roger that." "Go ahead and commence launch" "I always get the feeling of sort of pent up excitement, but some nervousness " "swinging out over the stern of the ship looking out over the waves and realizing that all of a minute you're going to splosh down in there and the porthole is going to look like the inside of a washing machine." "Atlantis" " Alvin lights on, vent valve is open, hatches shut." "Oxygen is on." "Tracking is on." "8.1." "Permission to dive when the swimmers are clear." "Clear to dive when swimmers are clear." "Roger." "Alvin diving." "Read off Target 1" "First target is 34604642." "OK, What's the landing target?" "The sun's rays can't penetrate far into the water." "Eventually the last of the daylight will fade away." "The sub is free falling and Matt and Susan drop at a rate of 30 meters a minute down into the darkness." "If they could see where they were heading, the view would take their breath away." "1700 meters below, the valley at the centre of the mid Atlantic ridge stretches out before them." "Atlantis-Alvin." "Depth?" "1623, 100 off the bottom." "I'll call you when we get there." "I'm getting ready to release my first weight." "OK, one weight away, listen and you might hear it." "Didn't hear it, but I saw it in the camera." "And that should slow our descent rate." "We're down to 60 meters up off the bottom." "Bottom's in sight." "Atlantis-Alvin." "Depth 1712 on the bottom." "Roger that." "OK I've seen some structures that looked like maybe this is at the edge of a lava field and I see drain back features." "I've seen some collapses." "That's good." "OK." "We might be on the edge of a lava lake field." "Oh yes," "I'm going past some lava pillows on my side." "Oh yeah, oh here it's beautiful." "Alvin has landed in the heart of the mid Atlantic ridge - the place where the Earth's crust is being created." "This is a lava lake where submarine flows of lava have become twisted into dramatic shapes." "The rock here is just a few hundred years old." "The sharp pillars have not been softened by time." "The submersible's journey across the lava lake takes it between the three peaks of the Lucky Strike volcano." "At this depth the only light comes from the submersible itself as it finds its way along the rugged terrain." "Oh well, what do I see here." "I see some white." "Something white?" "What do you see out of the port window?" "I see what looks like some hydro thermal staining to me." "Matt and Susan have detected staining deposited by hot springs called hydro-thermal vents." "When volcanoes and water mix hot springs are an inevitable result and the presence of these deep sea vents had been predicted." "But the reality turned out to be even more startling than the wildest predictions." "The first time Alvin came across a black smoker it was piloted by Dudley Foster." "It was like a steam locomotive billowing smoke out of the bottom." "And I couldn't imagine what it was," "I was just you know, floundered and floored by this." "We stuck the temperature probe into this plume of water and the probe could only measure up to 30 degrees and that pegged immediately, so I moved the probe out of that and I could see the end of the probe" "had turned black and it looked, I thought well, this is kind of the dust whatever the smokey stuff is and when we got back to the surface we found that the PVC rod had actually been burned in the few seconds" "that it was in this water." "That was our first clue that this was extremely hot." "Oh man, did I open up a nice hole." "Look at that." "That is sweet." "That's a big one." "I like that." "Oh, right." "That should be an easy one to sample." "Once we'd discovered that how hot these hydro- thermal vents could get we became concerned about the impact on the submersible, particularly since the view ports are made out of plastic and at the sort of depths we're working," "they could start to lose their strength in about 90 degrees C." "18, 74, 216, 241, 256, 303, 291, 321, 321..." "The water pumping out of this vent is at 321 degrees Centigrade." "We worked very close to these structures because we reach out with the manipulator and sample them, put probes in them and do a lot of work around them, but frequently there are several and you can easily bump up next to one" "and several times the fiberglass skin on the submarine has actually been burned." "Come back with several layers of glass burned away and the paint charred black." "It's a hazardous environment for the sub and its crew, but no-one had imagined it could also support life." "OK, Let's see if we could smoke some of these shrimp." "These look great." "Yes I..." "Are you, are you getting any?" "I'm working on it to get some of this stuff in there," "I'm getting some bacterial mat." "OK well keep trying on the shrimp." "Shrimp are pretty resilient." "They're saying "oh, no, no." "I'm not going in there"." "I know." "They can move around pretty fast." "Get in there!" "Get in there!" "Get in there!" "OK." "Well, however many we've got, maybe we should call it quits." "I'll look up our range and bearing to our next site." "Shrimp, mussels and fish have all been found thriving around the smokers." "They survive where most scientists expected life to be impossible in the pitch dark, cut off from the sun's energy, which fuels every other echo system on the planet." "At the bottom of this complex web of life, supporting the whole thing, are bacteria." "Those bacteria feed off the rich cocktail of chemicals spewing out in the superheated water." "All these living things are totally dependent on the earth's own energy." "Locked up in the rocks of South Africa is evidence that this strange world has existed for billions of years." "Well here we are in Barberton mountain land walking on some of the oldest rocks that have ever been found on earth." "And the particular rocks that I am walking on are ocean floor rocks, very old ocean floor." "And we now know that this ocean floor and all these rocks everywhere around us here are 3.5 billion years old." "Come up here." "This is where the rocks have been cracked open in two." "Look this hand here fits with that hand over there." "Only we can see this pillows, these belts in cross section, very nicely." "This is very characteristic of how lava forms or the sort of shapes lava forms as it hits the ocean floor." "Underwater eruptions are very different to lava flows on land." "Lava erupting into water rapidly cools, forming a skin." "As more lava wells up from below it continuously pushes out new buds onto the ocean floor like pillows of solidifying rock." "Anywhere you go today you see these kind of fossils." "With these shapes you know you're walking on rocks that were once covered by, by water." "And like the oceans today, the ancient oceans also had black smokers." "Three and a half billion years ago, hot water streamed out of this rock." "The mineral deposits are not the only traces the smokers left behind." "And when we look at these flinty rocks in detail under the microscope we find very ancient bacteria." "So that I think makes it a very solid case for the sort of hypothesis that are hanging around that make people believe, perhaps, these kind of associations, the pillow basalts and the black smokers are the sort of areas, the niches," "were life might have originated." "Could it be that life on our planet first evolved at a hydro-thermal vent?" "On board Atlantis, biologists are studying the bacteria from black smokers to see how closely they are related to the earliest forms of life." "Judy which sample are we working with?" "We'll start with the slurry that's been settling..." "Analysis of their DNA shows the deep sea bacteria are the most primitive forms of life on the evolutionary tree." "These bacteria really could be the direct descendants of the first living things on Earth." "The work on the evolution of life all stemmed from a simple observation:" "the matching of two distant coastlines." "In the last few decades, the deep ocean has begun to lay bare its secrets to science." "We've finally come to understand how truly dynamic our planet is and how the sea floor is being continuously remade." "Perhaps the most fascinating discovery of them all is the links we've found between the earth's activity and the origin of life." "The energy which fuelled the first living thing is the same energy that is still remaking the surface of our planet." "But if you think about it, there's a problem." "For billions of years, new sea floor has been continuously produced at mid-ocean ridges - so, unless the earth's been getting steadily bigger over all that time - there must be somewhere on the planet where crust is being devoured" "as fast as it's being made." "Solving that paradox will take us in our next programme to the volcanoes ringing the Pacific and also explain how the land we live on came into being." "Subtitles:" "Thor"