Thursday, 4:30 PM
Local scientists to lead Arctic trek
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff
WOODS HOLE -- An international team of scientists is embarking on a search for life on the floor of the ocean at the roof of the world.
Led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution -- and equipped with unique robotic vehicles designed to explore mountain ranges lying miles beneath the polar ice cap -- 30 geophysicists, biologists, engineers, chemists, and other deep-sea specialists will depart July 1 from a remote Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard, aboard a powerful icebreaker that will smash a path to exploration sites near the geographic North Pole.
The Arctic, its mysteries concealed beneath thick ice, is the smallest but least-known of the world’s oceans.
"This is about exploring a portion of the earth that has been largely inaccessible to science," said Robert Reves-Sohn, a geophysicist from the institution who will serve as chief scientist on the 40-day voyage. "We’re looking for underseas habitats and creatures never seen before," he said at a news conference Thursday.
The major aim of the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition is to seek out exotic life forms believed to thrive near deep-lying hydrothermal vents. Known as "black smokers" because they exhale dark minerals as well as superheated water, such volcanic vents have been discovered in the Pacific and Atlantic -- succoring bizarre 10-foot-long tubeworms and a strange species of swarming shrimp at depths and pressures that should by all logic be frigid and lifeless.
