In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet's interior

In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet's interior

There were no biologists on board the research vessel that day. There were no biologists on board because no one in 1977 expected to find any biology. The R/V Knorr, which had sailed from the Panama Canal on 8 February under the joint direction of Richard Von Herzen and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was a geology cruise — funded by the National Science Foundation, equipped with seafloor mapping instruments, staffed …