Antje Boetius was a young biogeochemist aboard one of the research expeditions off Oregon in 1999. She had recently moved to the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, which collaborates closely with Suess’s group, to learn a couple of fundamental techniques of molecular ecology she needed to complete her own research project in the Indian Ocean. That project was not related to hydrates or to the deep biosphere. It was “just regular deep-sea research—going to the big wide cold ocean,” Boetius says now, as one who has left all that behind. The discovery she made at Hydrate Ridge changed her career.

What captured Boetius’s imagination there were the clusters of organisms, known as cold-seep communities, which had taken up residence around the places where methane seeps from the seafloor. Suess was among the first researchers to discover a cold-seep community. While he was working at Oregon State two decades ago, some of his colleagues explored a seafloor hot spring near the Galápagos Islands and brought back specimens of giant white clams collected with the submersible Alvin. The first time Suess got to dive in Alvin, in 1984, it was nearly 5,000 miles northwest of the Galápagos, just a few miles west of Hydrate Ridge and nowhere near a hot spring. Yet “there were the same damned critters,” he says. Not just clams but also tube worms and thick mats of bacteria, white or bright orange. Years later Suess would see those same mats draping the mounds at Hydrate Ridge, with the clams huddled around their edges.

 


Graphic by Don Foley, based on map produced by U.S. Geological Survey

GAS HYDRATES EVERYWHERE

The red dots indicate where researchers have proved that gas hydrates exist and where they are suspected to exist. But no matter where researchers now drill under the sea, they find methane, often in the form of a hydrate. Major concentrations off the coast of the United States have been found along the edge of the continental shelf between New Jersey and Georgia. U.S. Geological Survey researchers estimate that the Blake Ridge alone, off the South Carolina–Georgia coast, contains 30 times as much methane as Americans consume in natural gas every year.