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Where researchers found the animals
The cavities lay beneath lobate lava at Fava Flow Suburbs, near 9°50′N on the East Pacific Rise, at a water depth of 2,515 meters. They held hydrothermal fluids and were part of the shallow subseafloor crust: below the exposed seafloor, but not deep within Earth’s crust.
During a July 2023 expedition aboard the R/V Falkor (too), a team led by Monika Bright and Sabine Gollner used Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle SuBastian to investigate the site. They drilled a small hole through an existing crack in the lava to sample fluids and measure temperature, then lifted lava shelves to expose the cavities. The study describes six cavities in six patches of roughly 50 by 50 centimeters, clustered within an area of about 20 by 20 meters.
What was living in the cavities?
Five of the six cavities were about 10 centimeters high and contained macroscopically visible animals. One cavity, about 5 centimeters high, appeared uninhabited, although three mussels were on the surface above it.
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The animals included sessile tubeworms, especially Oasisia alvinae, alongside mobile vent animals. The reported mobile fauna included Paralvinella, Nereis sandersi, Branchinogluma, Neomphalus fretterae and Lepetodrilus. The study recorded O. alvinae tubes up to 20 centimeters long; in one cavity, about 80 of the tubeworms occupied an area smaller than 0.25 square meters.
What conditions were measured below the lava?
In the five inhabited cavities, the reported mean maximum temperature was 18.1 ± 7.1 °C. The authors also reported cavity-water pH of 6.1 ± 0.4 and salinity of 33.8 ± 0.4. Their reported minimum sulfide concentration was 136 ± 165 μmol/L, and maximum oxygen concentration was 63 ± 25 μmol/L. These are measurements from the sampled cavities at this site, not a description of conditions throughout the oceanic crust or at all hydrothermal vents.
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How could animals get below the seafloor?
The researchers directly observed some mobile animals crawling through cracks between the cavities and the seafloor. That is different from the proposed explanation for how tubeworms and other animals first reach the habitat.
The authors suggest that larvae may enter the crust with seawater in a hydrothermal recharge zone, move through the shallow cavity system, and settle beneath the seafloor or emerge through cracks in a discharge zone. The study did not track larvae along that entire route, so it remains a proposed model rather than an observed journey.
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What the discovery does—and does not—show
The finding establishes that vent-associated animals can inhabit shallow cavities below the visible seafloor at this East Pacific Rise site. It does not establish how widespread these cavities are, how often they contain animals at other vents, or the total three-dimensional extent of the habitat. Six cavities within a small area cannot answer those broader questions.
The authors say the habitat could affect local and regional estimates of geochemical flux. Many hydrothermal-vent animals host bacteria that oxidize reduced chemicals and fix carbon, so communities hidden beneath the seafloor may matter to how scientists account for those processes. The study raises this as an implication; it does not measure a global effect.
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The authors also argue that vent habitats merit protection while the extent of this newly identified habitat remains unknown. Their central ecological point is that visible seafloor communities and animals below it may be connected, even where the connection is not obvious from the surface.
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Bright, Gollner and colleagues published the peer-reviewed study in Nature Communications on 15 October 2024. The article is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license, and the authors state that the data generated or analyzed are included in the article. Schmidt Ocean Institute ROV dive videos are also described as open access. Read the study in Nature Communications.
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