Ship Brings Rocky Clues to Life’s Origins Up From Ocean’s ‘Lost City’

Scientists in an expedition to the Mid-Atlantic ocean ridge lifted almost a mile of precious rocks from beneath an exotic feature linked to life’s possible beginning.

Researchers have long argued that regions deep in the Earth’s oceans may harbor sites from which all terrestrial life sprung. In the Atlantic, they gave the name “Lost City” to a jagged landscape of eerie spires under which they proposed that the life-preceding chemistry may have churned.

And now for the first time, specialists have succeeded in getting a glimpse of this potential Garden of Eden.

A report in the journal Science on Thursday tells of a 30-person team drilling deep into a region of the Mid-Atlantic seabed and pulling up nearly a mile of extremely rare rocky material. Never before has a sample so massive and from such a great depth come to light. The material is central to a major theory on the origin of life.

“We did it,” said Frieder Klein, an expedition team member at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “We now have a treasure trove of rocks that will let us systematically study the processes that people believe are relevant to the emergence of life on the planet.”

The drilled region sits alongside one of the volcanic rifts that crisscross the global seabed like the seams of a baseball. Known as midocean ridges, the abyssal sites feature hot springs whose shimmering waters shed minerals into the icy seawater, slowly building up strange mounds and spires that sometimes host riots of bizarre creatures.

For decades, scientists have theorized that the hot springs or their underlying rocks nurtured geochemical reactions that billions of years ago begot terrestrial life. Recently, they’ve accelerated their hunt for supporting clues.