UW News

Lost City hydrothermal vents


May 19, 2015

UW’s Deborah Kelley publishes atlas of seafloor volcanoes and deep-ocean life

book cover with photo of tall pillars

Oceanographer Deborah Kelley is one of the lead authors of a first-of-its-kind atlas of the deep sea, titled “Discovering the Deep.”


January 11, 2010

Microbe understudies await their turn in the limelight

On the marine microbial stage, there appears to be a vast group of understudies only too ready to step in when


January 31, 2008

Lost City pumps life-essential chemicals at rates unseen at typical black smokers

Hydrocarbons — molecules critical to life — are being generated by the simple interaction of seawater with the rocks under the Lost City hydrothermal vent field in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.


March 10, 2005

Life in ‘Lost City’

The hydrothermal vents were miles from where anyone could have imagined.


August 7, 2003

Seafloor vent systems may have spawned earliest life

Black smoker hydrothermal vent systems may have the fire power, but the staying power of seafloor hydrothermal vent systems like the bizarre Lost City vent field — discovered just two and a half years ago — is one reason they may have been incubators of some of Earth’s earliest life, say UW scientists and their co-authors in a recent issue of Science.


December 12, 2000

Hydrothermal vent system unlike any seen before found in Atlantic

A new hydrothermal vent field, which scientists have dubbed “The Lost City,” was discovered Dec. 4 on an undersea mountain in the Atlantic Ocean.