Pacific Spirit Marine Institute

Ancient Medusa of the Sea, Modern Medusa of the Sea

Monday, June 18, 2007

In the big picture geothermal vents are a fairly recent discovery. Or, are they?

The first of these vents being discovered in the modern days of 1977, new vents are still being found. As the technology advances for deeper and deeper exploration, our ability to find more of these vents increases.

Volcanic conduits heat these geothermal vents. In April a new undersea mineral chimney was discovered off the coast of Costa Rica 8,500 feet below the surface of the water.

This chimney called a “black smoker” was found to be emitting hot iron-darkened water. Scientists from Duke, the University of New Hampshire, and So. Carolina and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts named their discovery the Medusa Hydrothermal Vent Field.

A unique form of jellyfish order, stauromedusae, was found to be living in the mini eco-system produced by the hot waters of these vents. These jellyfish may even be a newly discover species. Their pink color is one unseen before.

The stauromedusae orders of jellyfish generally live further away from the heated vents in cooler water. These vents and now the discovery of life being able to sustain itself in the hotter waters close to the vents are giving scientists a new opportunity to study how living organisms adapt to extreme environmental conditions as well as insights into the origin of the earth’s crust and its evolution.

In addition to the jellyfish there are also heat-tolerant tubeworms living on Medusa’s chimneys.

I’m always amazed when I read stories about things being discovered like this newly named Medusa field and how these things somehow always seem to work back to our earth’s ancient history.

The original Medusa was carrying the child of Poseidon, god of the seas. She offended Athena who turned Medusa’s beautiful hair in the snakes, or was her hair actually turned into tubeworms of the sea?

Her face was then made so hideous that all who looked upon her were turned to stone. Was that stone actually lava flow from beneath the sea?

Poseidon was an angry and hot-tempered type and he carried the trident, with which he could split boulders and cause earthquakes. Modern science now knows this is how these geothermal vents are created, as well as the ocean shelves of the earth’s deep seas.

It’s a wonder to me how ‘myth’ is often times so close to ‘reality’. I stand in constant wonder and awe of the possibilities of our perhaps forgotten past. Were the ancient Greeks and Romans able to explore the depths of the sea? Perhaps the seas were not nearly so deep in our earths ancient past.

Who knows? But, these are interesting things to ponder.

Labels: Black Smokers, Commercial Fishing Nets, Deep seawater, Geothermal Vents, Global Warming, Medusa, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Sea