Deep-sea hydrothermal vents and cold seeps

Table 19.3 Known and Proposed Microbial Metabolic Pathways at Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents and Cold Seeps. 

One of the most spectacular features of deep-sea hydrothermal vents and cold seeps is the abundance and novelty of life they support. Vent and seep ecosystems share several fundamental similarities, despite the fact that they are quite different environments that originate from very different geotectonic settings. Hydrothermal vents are characterised by low to high temperature fluids (up to 400°C), with diffuse or highly focused fluid flow, while seeps are characterised by cold temperature fluids, generally with diffuse, slow fluid flow. Their most... 

Only deep-sea hydrothermal vents and cold-seeps are discussed in this chapter. Shallow vents and seeps are known from a variety of locations, from the littoral zone to several tens of metres (e.g. Holm, 1987 Jensen etal., 1992 Dando etal., 1994a,b, 1995). Shallow vents have many differences from their deeper counterparts. They lack metal-rich and extreme high temperature fluids, as well as large-scale mineral deposits. They also lack typical hydrothermal vent animals. Biomass production in both systems is lower than at deep-sea vents and deep... 

Table 8.2 Known and proposed microbial metabolic pathways at deep-sea hydrothermal vents and cold seeps... 

Future prospects for research on deep-sea hydrothermal vents and cold seeps are very promising. New technical approaches and exploration methods (e.g. autonomous vehicles like ABE Embley etal., 2002) will likely benefit this research. Molecular methods will help us to better understand the diversity and possibly the metabolisms of un-culturable environmental microorganisms. Long-term seafloor observatories like NeMO (Embley Baker, 1999) and NEPTUNE (Delaney etal., 2000) will allow us to more easily study episodic events like volcanic eruptions at ridges and massive methane releases from seeps. As well, these observatories will provide data in the form of long-term time... 

---