A hydrothermal vent is a long, narrow opening on the seabed of the
Earth from which heated water escapes along with geothermal energy.
Hydrothermal vents are commonly found near volcanically active
places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart at spreading
centers, ocean basins and hot-spots.
Hydrothermal deposits are rocks and mineral ore deposits formed by
the action of hydrothermal vents. Deep sea organisms have no access
to sunlight, so they must depend on nutrients in the chemical
deposits and hydrothermal fluids in which they live. Compared to the
surrounding sea floor, the hydrothermal vent zone have a density of
organisms 10,000 to 100,000 times greater.
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| William Martin Micheal Russell |
The deep sea vent or alkaline hydrothermal vent theory posits that
life may have begun at submarine hydrothermal vents, William Martin
and Michael Russell have suggested that life evolved in structured
iron mono-sulphide precipitates in a seepage site hydrothermal mound at
a redox, pH and temperature gradient between sulphide-rich
hydrothermal fluid and ferrous containing waters of the Hadean Ocean
floor.
The surfaces of mineral particles inside hydrothermal vents have
catalytic properties similar to those of enzymes and are able to
create simple organic molecules and compounds as seawater and
hydrothermal fluids at thermodynamically disequilibrium stage, mix
and move towards a more stable state. The available energy is
maximized at around 100 – 15 degree Celsius, precisely the
temperatures at which the hyperthermophilic bacteria and
thermoacidophilic archaea have been found, at the base of the
phylogenetic tree of life closest to Last Universal Common Ancestor
(LUCA).
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| Melvin Calvin |
The hot mineral water has a pH of 9 – 11 because of containing
bicarbonate and calcium ions which has the most optimal range similar
to the origin of life in hydrothermal vents. According to Melvin
Calvin, an American Biochemist, in 2010 suggested that certain
reactions of condensation-dehydration of amino acids and nucleotides
in individual blocks of peptides and nucleic acids can take place in
the primary hydrosphere with pH 9 – 11 at a later evolutionary
stage. This is the environment in which Stromatolites have been
created on the basis of the formation of Stromatolites in the hot
mineral water at the Yellowstone National Park.
Stromatolites can survive in hot mineral water and in proximity to
area with volcanic activity. Processes have evolved in the sea near
geysers of hot mineral water such as the hydrothermal vents in
submarine.
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| Stromatolites found in Yellowstone National Park |
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| Antonio Lazcano |
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| Stanley. L. Miller |
In 1994, a Mexican researcher, Antonio Lazcano and an American
Chemist, Stanley Miller suggested once that the pace of molecular
evolution was dictated by the rate of recirculating water through
mid-ocean submarine vents. They estimate that the development of a
100 kilo-base genome of a DNA / protein primitive heterotroph into a
7000 gene filamentous cyanobacteria would have required only 7 million
years that led to the formation of stromatolites nearby these
hydrothermal vents. However the earliest known lifeforms are thought
to have lived near such vents.
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