NARRATOR (AMANDA REDMAN): 180 miles off the North Pacific coast a team of scientists and engineers are on a voyage of discovery. They're using the world's most sophisticated submarine technology. They'll be working 24 hours a day, but it's not going to be plain sailing.

VERONIQUE ROBIGOU (Marine Geologist, University of Washington): We're really going to places where nobody has gone before.

DR. DEBORAH KELLEY (Marine Geologist, University of Washington): Must have been like when they explored the West.

PROF. JOHN BAROSS (Microbiologist, University of Washington): It has for me the same kind of fascination and sense of discovery and exploration that I would have if I got to go to Mars.

NARRATOR: Their mission is to recover a treasure-trove of riches from the ocean floor, but they're not looking for gold from shipwrecks. The treasure they are seeking could yield even greater riches: the secret of the creation of life. Down at Astoria's Docks a research vessel is being prepared for a multi-million dollar expedition.

MAN: It's a floating lab. It's the Atlantis, a ship for science. Let's do a couple more.

NARRATOR: The Atlantis is equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories. For scientists it's a home from home.

VERONIQUE ROBIGOU: That's all we've brought.

MAN: That's all you've brought.

VERONIQUE: That's all we've brought. So glad to be here.

MAN: Kleenex, got to have those Kleenex. Going to be a lot of tears on this cruise.

NARRATOR: The head of the team is marine geologist John Delaney.

PROF. JOHN DELANEY (University of Washington): It won't be a problem, I promise you, you won't sleep in the rain. Any time one attempts to do something under the ocean 2½ kilometres down and tries to do something no-one's done before there's got to be an element of risk.

MAN: I'm not kidding.

JOHN DELANEY: It's exciting. Bottom line is it's fun to try something no-one's done before and to succeed.

NARRATOR: Delaney is joined by a team of scientists from the University of Washington, including geologist Veronique Robigou and head scientist on the expedition, Deborah Kelley.

DEBORAH KELLEY: ...that whole area's for video. (OK) OK.

NARRATOR: Their destination is the Juan de Fuca ridge in the North Pacific, 180 miles off the coast of Seattle. Many of them have been to the ridge before, but this trip's different because they are hoping to complete the final chapter in an amazing story that began over 20 years ago. For centuries our vision of the ocean floor has been of a hostile world of crushing pressure, extreme cold and constant darkness. It's a world revealed only by the lights of a submarine.

JOHN DELANEY: Years ago the concept of the deep sea floor was that it was a cold, forbidding, barren place and no-one imagined that it could generate and support a biosphere. No-one imagined that.

NARRATOR: With no sunlight there would be no life.

JOHN BAROSS: What we knew about the deep sea is, is in general is that very little organic nutrients get to the bottom of the ocean, particularly in the deep sea. The organic material that supports any kind of animal-life in the benthos in the deep sea comes from surface photosynthesis, and the deeper you go, the less flux of that material you get from the surface to the bottom and so you don't expect to see a lot of organisms.

NARRATOR: But this vision of the dead sea floor did not last. In the 1950s naval surveys began to reveal evidence of huge volcanic ridges on the ocean floor. Geologists believed there might also be underwater hot springs releasing heat from the Earth's crust, but no-one had ever seen them. Then in the early 70s a young geologist decided to go and look for them.

PROF. JACK CORLISS (Central European University, Budapest): I put together a proposal to actually go down with the submarine to one of these mid-ocean ridges and look around and see if we could find hot springs and not only that, but also to study them, to explore them, to collect as much information as we could about what was going on with this imaginary hot springs at that point. They were just a vision.

NARRATOR: In August 1977 Corliss and 10 other geologists set sail on an historic voyage to the Galápagos Ridge in the East Pacific.

JACK CORLISS: The sea floor there's very glassy, sort of smooth and essentially nothing very visible living on this bare rock, so we were heading off across the sort of desert which is the ocean floor and the pilot saw a crab out there, a little white deep sea crab and that was interesting and then I saw one out the window and then the pilot saw another one and then the pilot says the water's getting a little milky out here and my temperature device, I'm watching it, and it starts to go up a few thousandths of a degree, just creeping up, just in, looks a little suspicious and then the alarm that I had set on it starts going beep, beep and it climbs up fur, a little further and I'm wondering what it is and then the pilot says there's clams out here. When we actually found the hot springs it was amazing.

NARRATOR: They had found the hot springs and they had also found life. A shimmering oasis of deep sea creatures - crabs, snails and colonies of strange tube-like animals bunched together like flowers. Many of these life forms had never been seen by humans before.

JOHN BAROSS: They saw all these bizarre animals and they really did think they were entering into a primordial ecosystem that had remained unchanged for perhaps tens of millions of years, that we had entered into this lost world and they were profoundly moved by that, knowing that what they're seeing is just the surface of what has turned out to be one of the, I think one of the most important science discoveries of you know the past 25 years.

NARRATOR: These exotic creatures weren't just visitors from above. They were at home living a mile and a half below the surface in one of the most hostile places on Earth. The geologists had never seen anything like it.

JACK CORLISS: I thought well that's interesting. There's no what was sunlight down there. It's absolutely dark and all the known ecological systems on the Earth derive their energy from the sun. This was the first total ecological system that had ever been found that got its energy somewhere else.

NARRATOR: For the time being how these animals survived had to remain a mystery. There were no biologists on board because no-one had dreamt there would be any life for them to study, so the team took samples back with them to be analysed. These were gold-dust to the waiting biologists.

JOHN BAROSS: From then on I think we were all ears. There was all this information and rumours and, and who was going to get what, what kind of samples were going to be brought back, who was going to get all the biology and I was very excited about this. This, you know, how these animals fed, what, how these tube worms were making a living, there's certainly no light, there's no photosynthesis.

NARRATOR: As soon as a biologist set to work on the samples the mystery was solved. When they dissected the tube worms they found a remarkable source of food: tiny, single celled bacteria. These bacteria are chemo-synthetic. Unlike plants which look to the sun for their energy, the microbes look to the centre of the Earth. They feed on chemicals like caustic acid and carbon dioxide that come up through the hot springs from deep inside the bowels of the Earth. They in turn become the basic nutrients for the tube worms and other animals higher up the food chain.

JOHN BAROSS: We just didn't think very much about perhaps microbial chemo-synthesis being a base of a major food chain. You know we, we're still very much biased towards photosynthesis being the primary producers from there leading to higher animals so that was a big surprise. I just don't think it could have been predicted based on what we knew and it's still a big surprise today to think that animals have co-evolved with micro-organisms of that kind of abundance and that kind of density is still pretty awesome.

NARRATOR: After the news broke, everyone wanted to look for more hot springs. So they began to search along the volcanic ridges where the Earth's tectonic plates meet. In 1979 a new set of hot springs full of life were discovered north of Mexico, but they revealed something even more dramatic: huge volcanic chimneys spewing out clouds of black chemical-ridden smoke at unbelievably high temperatures.

DEBORAH KELLEY: The first time I saw a black smoker was, it was pretty incredible. They just, they just come out of the middle of nowhere you know.

JOHN DELANEY: I remember vividly the discovery of black smokers and being entranced. It was riveting for me and at that point I decided that even though it might not converge with my career that my career would converge with it.

NARRATOR: Geologists soon worked out how the chimneys formed: scalding water seeped with dissolved minerals and silica was rising up from the Earth's crust. As it met the almost freezing sea-water the minerals would precipitate out forming a solid tower of rock. These towering structures, some as high as 150ft, grew at an incredible speed. In some cases as fast as 12 inches per day and the first temperature measurements revealed an astonishing range of heat within a single chimney. On the outside a mere 2 degrees Centigrade, almost freezing, but towards the middle of the hottest chimneys, the black smokers, it was a raging 350 degrees.

JACK CORLISS: It's very, very impressive. There's an enormous amount of heat coming out. If you took 30 of these individual vents you have the amount of energy of the largest nuclear power reactors.

NARRATOR: Hardly any of these unique power sources have been explored. What's more, the workings of the ones that have been found are still a mystery, but if scientists could unravel the secrets of these chimneys it's possible that they could solve an even greater mystery.

JACK CORLISS: Just a few months after the expedition, I did a lecture in San Francisco. I was making the point that some very fundamental new things were discovered about biological systems and I almost said at that point like the origin of life but I felt, you know, I don't know anything about the origin of life.

NARRATOR: Four billion years ago somewhere on the planet life was created. How did this miracle happen? It is the great question. And the most famous attempt to answer it came in 1952 with the Miller-Urey experiment. Dr. Stanley Miller began by concocting his receipe for the early Earth's atmosphere, a cocktail of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water in a glass flask. Then he added the vital ingredient: a burst of energy, an electric spark producing the essential conditions to break up the simple molecules in the mixture and allow them to reform into more complex structures. In a week his model produced amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, which in turn are the building blocks of life. Miller's ingredients and conditions were based on speculation, a guess at what the atmosphere was like on the early Earth. Corliss believed that he had seen these conditions for real - in the hydrothermal vents.

JACK CORLISS: Here was a huge energy source, the fluids were heated and cooled, all the right chemicals were there. The point about the hot springs is that it's going through very fast changes, just like in the electrical discharge experiment, the, these fluids are exposed to very high temperatures, they're heated to very high temperatures. These molecules can crash into one another and form these high energy structures. If they stay at the high temperature then they'll fall apart, but if you, if they move away from the electrical spark, or if they move up in the hot spring and mix with cold water then you freeze the energy into these molecules and so you create organic compounds in a situation where, if you kept them at high temperatures, they would fall apart, but you quench them and freeze them and it happened in the Miller-Urey experiment and it happens in the hot spring.

NARRATOR: In 1981 Corliss produced a paper proposing his new theory of the origin of life together with two students, one of whom was the young John Baross.

JOHN BAROSS: I think the origin of life question was perhaps the most important question for me personally that came out of the discovery of the vents and it does not take, you know, more than about 5 synapsing cells in your head to, to, to say that perhaps there's a set of conditions in these environments that could be conducive to at least some stages necessary for the origin of life.

NARRATOR: Over the years several scientists managed to create organic compounds using models based on the conditions in hydrothermal vents. But everyone was guessing about what those conditions were. For Baross this wasn't enough. Baross wanted to construct an experiment based not on theory but hard evidence. He wanted to reproduce the exact conditions of the vents, the fluid flows, microbial and mineral distribution and most important, the temperature and pressure changes within the chimney, but to do this Baross needed to get some chimneys into the lab. Thanks to one of his colleagues, he might be able to. John Delaney, marine geologist, is a world authority on hydrothermal vents. (ACTUALITY CHAT) He has been dreaming for years of being able to study them in close-up.

JOHN DELANEY: The kinds of studies that we need to be able to do with the samples cannot be done on the seafloor. We need to look inside. This is the circulatory system of this living ecological community and to, to understand it we can't simply sit on the seafloor and watch it.

NARRATOR: Like Baross, Delaney believes these sulphide chimneys could answer some profound questions, so he's decided to go and get some. In 1993 he began masterminding a huge project, to surgically remove a group of chimneys from the ocean floor and raise them to the surface intact for scientists to study on land. Now, 6 years later, the dream is about to become reality. This expedition is not to recover the chimneys. That won't happen for at least another year. First they need to choose the chimneys they want to recover and for that they need to make a unique map. It's only a tiny section of the seafloor, but it will be the most detailed ocean map ever. This is an ambitious task, but they do have some expert help: a multi-million dollar Naval imaging robot called Jason. (ACTUALITY CHAT) It's 1½ miles down. Jason will take 2 hours to get there. While the scientists watch in the ship's control room above, Jason will hover around the chimneys taking thousands of digital photographs which a computer will transform into a 3D map. The whole system depends on navigation beacons called transponders which mark Jason's exact location. The transponders are lowered down to the ocean floor in the middle of the night. Time is tight, so they're working round the clock. Once both the robot and transponders are safely on the ocean floor, Jason's pilot in the control room can hand over navigation of the robot to the computer. When the computer takes over the scientists can sit back and watch.

MAN: Pat, are you in auto right now?

MAN: Do you want me to go in auto?

MAN: Yeah.

MAN: You've got it.

MAN: Look at the profile.

(ACTUALITY CHAT)

MAN: Wow, yeah,

MAN: That's looking...

MAN: ...almost behind the vehicle. Now we've just got to make it look like something, so someone else will believe us.

NARRATOR: And here it is. This tiny section of terrain has now been mapped in greater detail than any other part of the ocean floor, down to the last centimetre. With this map and the photos they can begin to choose their chimneys. They'll have to avoid ones which might have fractures because they are likely to break. Now Delaney has a much better idea of the kind of thing he's after.

JOHN DELANEY: A large asparagus I guess would be the best description that I've heard lately and it seems to me that something along those lines is, is what we're after and we're looking for something that might be between 6 and 20 metres high and perhaps 2-3 metres across, maybe 4 metres across at the base, but really fairly regularly shaped and that would be the ideal structure within one of these clusters for us to recover.

NARRATOR: With the map complete they now need to work out how to recover the chimneys intact. In the past scientists have brought up samples using dredgers or grabs. Not for Delaney's chimneys. They need some precision engineering. Their plan is to bring them up in a cage secured with a series of steel lassoes. A robot will saw the chimney until it's weak enough to break off. Finally, a line will be floated to the surface so that the chimney can be pulled up from the ocean floor. That's the theory. Now 6 months later, while the scientists take a back seat, a team of engineers has come to Vancouver Island to test the idea out in practice.

LEROY OLSON (Chief Engineer): We're pushing the state of the art falling trees underwater, you know, I don't know of anybody that's taken a chainsaw down to these depths and tried cutting a rock structure and things.

NARRATOR: The chainsaw, attached to a robot called ROPOS, will be operated remotely by an engineer. The part of the chimney will be played by a submerged lump of concrete. It's tricky enough in a secluded harbour. When they start sawing at the bottom of the sea it'll be even more difficult.

LEROY OLSON: A lot of times it's the things you don't really think about that catch you. From the time we start one of these operations till it's actually secured on the deck we're going to be nervous about it because there's so many unknowns we're dealing with.

KEITH SHEPHERD (ROPOS Chief Engineer): These structures have always had hot water pouring through them and we're not sure at this point what's going to happen. We could get the saw blade in there and have, open up a new passage for the water to come out, the hot water could starts squirting out around the saw-blade and back towards the vehicle. It's definitely a, a concern.

NARRATOR: Fortunately the saw passes its first test.

JOHN DELANEY: That's a nice cut. I mean it did just made really quick work of it. I was impressed.

NARRATOR: But of course a hollow lump of concrete isn't the same thing as a black smoker.

JOHN DELANEY: The rocks themselves are intrinsically fractured, they are always fractured, all rocks have fractures in them and they're, rocks are not particularly strong in tension, so when we begin to lift the rock I have a feeling that it may come apart.

LEROY OLSON: We don't know how fragile they are and you know we want to get back something that's a, a solid structure and so we've kind of failed if it falls over and breaks up.

NARRATOR: With the engineering tests over Lee Olson had some news for Delaney.

LEROY OLSON: Well he came to me and said he wanted to recover something 20ft tall and 10ft in diameter and I said you're kidding 'cos it'll be too heavy. It would have been probably 120,000lbs or something so first thing I had to do was scale him down in size.

JOHN DELANEY: Realistically I would like to see an intact structure that's somewhere between 10 and 14ft tall, has not broken. That would be my hope.

NARRATOR: Now that Delaney's been forced to lower his sights it's all the more important that he get a good range of chimneys to study - old, young, dead, alive, smoking, non-smoking. If they can bring back at least one chimney that's alive and smoking it will be a scientific goldmine because while there may be a plethora of life on the chimney's surface hidden inside there is even more: billions of microbes living inside the rock itself.

VERONIQUE ROBIGOU: There really a living system and we know now that these rocks are full of life which we don't have access to by just sampling the surface area and so the only way to really understand the pattern of the life associated with the pattern of the flows and the pattern of the minerals inside the rock is going to bring one back an entire structure.

JOHN BAROSS: There's a huge amount of unknown, absolutely a huge amount and the few organisms that we've looked into have exotic enzymes, exotic strategies for coping with high temperature or high acidity, exotic ways of making energy so what we've done is essentially discover a whole world of new micro-organisms.

NARRATOR: Microbes that can survive such extreme conditions could be used in many processes in industry and medicine, and it's possible that if life did begin here in the hydrothermal vents, then these chimneys might still harbour the same kinds of organisms, the most primitive on Earth.

JOHN BAROSS: I think there is a very, very high probability of finding life forms that still retain genetic characteristics of some of the earliest life forms on Earth and so from that perspective it's a hunt for what I would call genetic fossils.

NARRATOR: It's been one year since the scientists last visited the Juan de Fuca ridge to make their map and choose their chimneys. Now they're on their way back. The team's mission is to retrieve at least 4 intact chimneys. They need two ships for the recovery, but they've only got them for 9 days, so time is short. After rigorous testing ROPOS is ready to be let loose on the ocean floor. Today they're hoping to raise their first chimney.

KEITH SHEPHERD: OK, we're still above the bottom but the vehicle's left the cage and we're just manoeuvring around and we'll be descending to the bottom shortly.

VOICE: OK Roger, yeah.

NARRATOR: As Keith Shepherd guides ROPOS to the chimneys by remote control it's a tense time. No-one's seen the chimneys for a whole year.

DEBORAH KELLEY: I bet you this is that little basin.

NARRATOR: Six months earlier an earthquake was recorded in the area. Their target chimneys might have collapsed.

DEBORAH KELLEY: OK, we can see Fawlty Towers. It's just coming into view. There should be a marker. Yeah, there's the marker. This is it. OK, there's that structure right here.

NARRATOR: Using the maps and photos they created the previous year, the team home in on their targets.

JOHN DELANEY: Check this one here. So it's about a metre wide.

MAN: Yeah, those are big.

NARRATOR: To make it easier to identify them they've given the chimneys names - Phang, Finn, Gwenen and Roane. They check each one to see if they've survived the earthquake intact. Now they're ready to cut.

KEITH SHEPHERD: Rotate that way. Right, now we want to test this off.

JOHN DELANEY: You're ready for that now? (Yeah) Don't, try not to...

NARRATOR: This is the first time they've tried the saw on a real chimney, They don't know what's going to happen so they've chosen a test chimney for the job.

MAN: Now this would be a dead one?

MAN: It's pretty dead.

DEBORAH KELLEY: It's certainly dead.

NARRATOR: And they're off.

(ACTUALITY CHAT)

JOHN DELANEY: It seems, it seems hard doesn't it?

KEITH SHEPHERD: (INAUDIBLE REMARK)

JOHN: It's perking the blade up.

KEITH: It's disappearing inside the rock.

NARRATOR: After 20 minutes of barely making an impact the saw stalls.

MAN: Harder than concrete, that's for sure.

NARRATOR: It's not just the saw that's holding things up. There's another problem on the way - the weather. The second recovery ship has arrived, but Olson has decided that it's too risky to send the equipment down. They decide to wait. And wait they did - 3 long days. It's 3 in the morning and Olson has given the go-ahead to start again. They still don't know if the saw will work, but there's no time for more testing. Now they'll have to try for a target chimney.

KEITH SHEPHERD: Yeah, facing east now.

NARRATOR: With ROPOS safely on the bottom they can now begin to secure Phang in the cage.

KEITH SHEPHERD: Nothing like the challenge, hey. That's pretty good there Bob. Hey our man. There we go. Rotate, rotate, rotate.

NARRATOR: But this time it's not the saw that's a problem.

MAN: OK Bob, can you swing it...

MAN: Oh shit.

DEBORAH KELLEY: It's broken John.

JOHN DELANEY: Well this one's ruined. OK let's take it off. We'll go find another one.

(ACTUALITY CHAT)

LEROY OLSON: I mean it's not a surprise. We knew it would happen.

JOHN: I knew it, so...

LEROY: A year ago you didn't. Say what you want now.

JOHN: Right. I feared, I feared that it happen, put it that way. That was not a, that was a natural looking fracture. I think you could have picked it out. I mean...

MAN: Hard to tell that?

JOHN: Well I can see one here.

NARRATOR: The chimney may now be unstable, but they decide to press on. This time at least the saw's up to the job.

KEITH SHEPHERD: Smoking. Try a bit of slew.

NARRATOR: Phang holds up to the sawing, but no-one can predict how it'll fare when they try to pull it up from the ocean floor.

LEROY OLSON: A scientist can go out and observe something and come back with all kinds of information he's succeeded. An engineer goes out in order to go out and bring something back and if he doesn't bring it back he hasn't succeeded and when you go out and try and get something you don't know what it is there's a lot more risk of failure.

NARRATOR: The engineers won't know if they've failed or succeeded until the chimney is raised to the surface.

MAN: We're just about on top of the spot now. He's just going to kick the stern to starboard.

MAN: The stern of the ship is now about 70 metres south-west of the site.

MAN: Oh that's a good position if you can hold it. Our line angle is perfect.

MAN: This is the fantail of the Tully. The unit is 1,000ft below us now.

MAN: Roger.

NARRATOR: It's a long, slow ride for Phang from the ocean floor, an hour and a half. It's an even longer one for the engineers waiting to see the damage.

MAN: ...Fantail We have it right at the water's surface here.

MAN: Great Roger.

MAN: It's really precarious.

MAN: We just need to get it on board.

NARRATOR: They haven't managed to get the whole chimney, but at least they have a real sample on board and they now know the recovery system works.

MAN: Back off there.

MAN: OK, rotate it around.

MAN: Hold it.

LEROY OLSON: We have the rock aboard. It's in 3 sections starting from the base up. We just lost the top piece.

MAN: Roger I'll pass that on to John. He can't wait, he's got to, he's got to get over there, so we'll be seeing him shortly there.

NARRATOR: Phang is made of basalt, silica and sulphide minerals. There are no microbes inside because Phang is an old, cold structure. It stopped smoking long ago. The geologists will image every inch of its surface and interior, mapping the internal structure, the mineralogy and fluid flows, gathering vital information about how the chimneys are formed and how they die.

JOHN DELANEY: OK, OK, that's a good start, it's a good start.

NARRATOR: Phang took 4 days to recover. They only have 5 days left to get the 3 remaining chimneys. After losing 2 more days to equipment problems they're about to bring up the second chimney - Roane.

JOHN DELANEY: ...could be, you know could be at the bottom. I mean that's where... There's it there, definitely a natural.

NARRATOR: Delaney's obviously had enough of precision engineering. He wants to ditch the saw and simply yank Roane off the bottom, hoping that the chimney will break at one of the fractures, but Lee Olson isn't happy.

LEROY OLSON: The debate is whether there's actually a fracture zone there in the right area that will let go and I think my point is that if we put a cut it can't hurt anything.

NARRATOR: Persuaded that the plan will save them precious time, Olson finally gives in. They'll soon find out if it's going to work. If Roane stays on the ocean floor the tension on the line will rise.

MAN: This is the fantail. We have about 12,000lbs tension on it now. We're just slowly building and very smooth.

MAN: Oh Roger that, Roger that.

MAN: We're going to stop at 20,000lbs. If it doesn't break I don't know. Have to wait.

NARRATOR: But if they wait too long and the line breaks and whips back up on deck it could kill someone.

LEROY OLSON: Unless it breaks loose at this I wouldn't want to go much higher and we're going to have to decide whether to send the line cutter down or not pretty soon here.

MAN: Roger that.

NARRATOR: Roane is refusing to budge. It's time to think about cutting the line.

LEROY OLSON: At the lowering grab right now if this was a free hanging rock down there it'd be too heavy to bring aboard we'd go over the 20,000lbs and...

MAN: It just broke.

LEROY: You're the luckiest bastard.

NARRATOR: They may have pulled it off, but they've no idea what damage has been done.

MAN: OK.

NARRATOR: For all their effort they've only managed to get two pieces of the rock, but these are still the best sulphide samples the microbiologists have ever seen. Even after being dragged through cold seawater for over an hour, the chimney is still measuring 194 degrees Centigrade inside. They have to take as many core samples as they can before the chimney cools down. These cores are invaluable especially to Baross.

JOHN BAROSS: What we're hoping to see is a, a gradient of temperature and see a whole variety of different microbial types in here. There's also going to be some work done on these samples to see if there's any evidence of whether or not organic compounds could be synthesised under these sort of hydrothermal vents' chemical conditions, so these are pretty exciting.

NARRATOR: In the onboard lab the cores are categorised and every feature of them carefully recorded. The scientists will spend years analysing the features of these samples hoping to assemble their list of perfect ingredients for creating life.

JOHN BAROSS: Ultimately if, if the goal is reached we will be able to say OK, this is a gradient through a core that's X number of centimetres and this is within the, the temperature range that, that we can predict a whole variety of organic compounds can exist. Let's construct this X number of centimetre gradient and put it under high temperature pressure conditions with flow and see what comes out of the top. An ultimate goal of this is to be able to reconstruct that kind of a hydrothermal system. In other words a little micro smoker right in your lap.

NARRATOR: But all this is years away. Right now there's a more pressing problem. They're running out of time. They want two more chimneys at least, but they've only got one more day left. They've managed to secure one chimney in its cage, Finn, the black smoker. Smokers are the most fragile of all. If they want to stop it from breaking they have to move slowly.

MAN: OK, it's going to be really slow. 11½ seconds per revolution.

MAN: How much?

MAN: 11½ seconds per revolution, way, way down.

LEROY OLSON: It's 300 degrees Centigrade and as soon as you start bringing it up the pressure goes off and it starts to boil and they figure it'll start to fracture and they want to bring it up slow and let it cool a little bit.

NARRATOR: 2½ hours later Finn, the most precious prize of all, is in sight.

WOMAN: The whole thing fell apart.

NARRATOR: It's not a complete disaster. The scientists can at least sample the interior straightaway, but they'll need to be quick.

DEBORAH KELLEY: I get pictures 'cos it's going to fall apart.

MAN: (INAUDIBLE REMARK)

MAN: Look at that now, that's amazing.

DEBORAH: Hey John.

JOHN: Hey you.

DEBORAH: The whole inside of this thing is raw green goo.

NARRATOR: The green goo turned out to be chalcopyrite, a copper iron sulphide mineral that inhabits only the hottest chimneys. The scientists are hoping for more revelations.

JOHN BAROSS: The one thing that, that one always thinks about when, when you go into these environments is, is that you potentially are going to make a new discovery on this cruise or on this dive. It somehow would never surprise me to, to see something, an animal that we've never seen before or that we thought was extinct tens of billions of years ago.

NARRATOR: The team have one more hour left. In a last frantic effort they've managed to capture the top part of Gwenen, their final chimney. Despite the rush, the chimney is intact. The scientists now have another sample, 1½ metres of rock covered with life which they'll have to sample at top speed because their time's up.

JOHN DELANEY: Deb, do you have everybody ready to boogie. I'd like to give it about a half an hour and then I think we've got to get, we've got to get the Tully going in order to make it on our...

DEBORAH KELLEY: OK. Josie, we've got about a half hour to do sampling.

NARRATOR: Now that the hunt is over the spoils won't just go to the scientists. One of the chimneys will be placed on public display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The chimneys may not be as big as they'd originally hoped for, but the scientists believe it's been worth all the effort.

JOHN BAROSS: The information that's going to come out of this sulphide recovery trip could have a profound influence on how we construct experiments to test the origin of life and in fact this is the most inter-disciplinary research group studying sulphide structures ever.

JACK CORLISS: I believe in basic research. I think you study important systems in an integrated way looking at very many aspects of it and what you find you don't know, you don't know ahead of time what you're going to find. When I was dredging rocks on the mid, mid-ocean ridges 25/30 years ago I never knew it was going to lead me to the origin of life, so there isn't a scientific method, you know. There are lots of different ways to do science and if you're studying something that's unknown then you have to be an explorer. That's what this research has been crying out for. We're going to learn an awful lot from this effort.

JOHN DELANEY: The overall aspiration of trying to do something new and different and it won't be a failure, it'll be a first step and with a structure from the seafloor we can begin to tell the story about how the Earth works and then how volcanoes can support life, so the recovery of the object is the beginning of telling the story and the beginning of doing the research. It's not the end.