IT WAS IN 2000, DURING A DIVE in a deep-sea submersible, that scientists stumbled upon a place unlike anywhere else on Earth. From a distance, it looked like an abandoned metropolis, its tall, smoking towers left billowing long after its inhabitants had fled. On closer inspection, the site, located 800m deep in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, turned out to be teeming with microbes, and the towers, seen in sharp focus, the likely source of their nutrition.
The Lost City is now recognised as a unique hydrothermal ecosystem, where temperatures rise to 40-70°C and calcium-rich, alkaline waters spew from seafloor vents, creating carbonate chimney-like structures over time, the largest of which, called Poseidon, reaches 60m tall. Life thrives here: not just microbes, but sponges, crabs and even corals. Scientists…