Back to the East Pacific Rise

The office is pretty quiet right now - between people just starting to trickle in from the holidays and the local mass exodus to the East Pacific Rise. I don't get to go back this time - to my tromping grounds as a graduate

(c) WHOI

student - but my office neighbor, his students and postdoc have just arrived. 'Dark Life at Deep-Sea Vents'. As the expedition name suggests, they will be focused primarily on life at vents... but not the life I usually study. You have to go smaller than even my tiny larvae, to the microbes - the core of the ecosystem there. The microbes convert the chemicals to the energy that fuels the abundant oases of life at vents.

Join Dive and Discover Expedition 15 here:
http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/