Searching for Life on the Seafloor

"Smaller than a fingernail, like bits of downy red feathers, baby tubeworms cling to a vertical wall towering alongside the submersible Alvin 2,500 meters beneath the sea in 2006. Repaved with fresh rock during an eruption at the East Pacific Rise, the walls mark the edge of the caldera of a deep-sea volcano. We three—pilot Pat Hickey, biologist Timothy Shank, and I—are the first human observers of these new colonizers, which are still so young they don’t yet have tubes to protect them from hungry crabs".

January 2012, as a member of the OASES 2012 expedition, McDermott is back exploring the ocean floor for unknown organisms.

Read more in her recent Oceanus article. Throughout the remainder of this month you can also follow her cruise experience at the expedition blog.