06/06/2026
A moment of discovery!
It was a nearly 20-hour dive that the hashtag science team will never forget — discovering the first vents in the little-explored Doldrums Megatransform and Fracture Zone off the coast of Brazil.
Guided by high-resolution maps created using the new AUV, The Childlike Empress, the team used ROV SuBastian to discover a scene in a little-explored part of the Atlantic Ocean that played out like a sci-fi movie set on another world: shimmering superheated water, black smokers, curious bacterial mats, and towering colorful chimneys covered with shrimp, crabs, mussels, and more, about 4000 meters down in the sunless deep sea.
First discovered in the late 70s, hydrothermal vents are places where superheated water erupts through cracks in the ocean floor, creating oases of life that survive and thrive on chemical energy rather than sunlight.
While vent ecosystems are well documented along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge itself, little is known about what lives on adjacent fault zones — and the Doldrums Megatransform and Fracture Zone had never been visually surveyed before. This is one of the largest, least explored oceanic fault systems on Earth. Vents like the ones found here represent some of the rarest kinds of vents discovered to date.
We have much more to understand and discover. The expedition, led by Dr. Aaron Micallef of MBARI and involving two PhD students of the doctorate course in Marine Sciences, Technology and Management, of the University of Milano-Bicocca, is just getting started. Subscribe to Schmidt Ocean Institute’s YouTube channel for dive alerts and explore this unstudied region with us as we ask: How many more vents, and what else, might we find? What species live here? And what does this fault zone tell us about how heat, water, and life move through the ocean crust?
Credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute
