The Black Smoker field looked like a drowned graveyard of titanic fiery chimneys.
Dozens of towering stone spires rose from the dark rock floor of Trench 05, some reaching forty meters into the boiling underground lake. From their jagged crests, dense, billowing clouds of black sulfide fluid erupted under huge earth-heat pressure, churning the surrounding water into a dark, scalding broth. The water here was four hundred degrees at the vent mouths, held in a liquid state only by the crushing eight crushing deep-sea pressure of deep water pressure bearing down from the mantle underground water bed above. A nonstop, low-hum roar echoed through the deep water. It shook through the living rock like an underground freight train.
Around the bases of these chimneys, life thrived in defiance of the deep pit. Massive colonies of giant tube worms with blood-red hemoglobin plumes swayed rhythmically in the heat eddies, anchored to dark rock ledges by thick hard-shelled sheaths. White sea-floor crabs, fully blind and adapted to chemical chemo-synthesis, crawled across crusts of precipitated iron pyrite and copper chalcopyrite, grazing on mats of thermophilic bacteria. The surrounding darkness was broken only by the faint, eerie infrared glow of the vent mouths and the living-glow pulses of deep-sea deep-sea shrimp darting through the stone plumes.
