Professor receives Fulbright to explore one of the world’s most unique hydrothermal vents
Formed by superheated glacial water from the last ice age, these hydrothermal vents have been bubbling beneath the fjord for centuries.
If you dive into the frigid Arctic water of a fjord called Eyjafjörður off the northern coast of Iceland, you’ll discover something out of a Jules Verne novel: towering white hydrothermal vents, some towering hundreds of feet from the seafloor.
By producing a steady flow of warm freshwater and food for sea creatures, the vents create a rare underwater oasis that supports dense marine life — including cod, kelp, and all manner of invertebrates — in the otherwise harsh Arctic environment, said Mark Patterson, professor of marine and environmental sciences and civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern.
“You’ve got sponges and corals and sea anemones and mussels and clams and bryozoans — these weird invertebrates that filter feed — and countless other creatures,” said Patterson, who also has appointments at the Global Resilience Institute, the Coastal Sustainability Institute and the Institute for Experiential Robotics.
Formed by superheated glacial water from the last ice age, the hydrothermal vents have been bubbling beneath the fjord for centuries, Patterson said. They release freshwater of up to 176 degrees that’s been trapped beneath Iceland’s volcanic crust for some 11,500 years, he said. Some of these systems can reach temperatures of more than 700 degrees.
Patterson, who is traveling to Iceland this fall to study these structures, described the site, known as the Strýtan field, as something of a “national treasure.”
“It’s probably one of the top 10 scuba dive spots on the planet, if you’re into diving in cold water,” Patterson said. “You hear all this bubbling noise; it’s like being in a giant carbonated soft drink as you swim around.”
But he is interested not only in how the vents sustain marine life but also in how they act as a buffer against changing ocean conditions. An excess of carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity is being absorbed by the world’s oceans and making the water highly acidic, something known as ocean acidification. But the vents release unusually alkaline freshwater into the fjord, helping to maintain the chemistry of the ocean around the vents and nurture the thriving tapestry of sea life that depends on them.
This quality also means that such hydrothermal vents offer scientists a rare underwater laboratory for studying how marine ecosystems might respond to ocean acidification and other ensuing effects of climate change.
Patterson has a track record of using cutting-edge robotics to study some of the planet’s most remote and fragile marine ecosystems, including the Strýtan field. That work has now earned him a prestigious opportunity: He was recently named a Fulbright-NSF Distinguished Arctic Research Scholar at the University of Iceland. Once there, he is planning to use marine robotics, advanced sensors and machine learning to explore the workings of these intricate systems.
The appointment, which awards internationally recognized researchers the opportunity to conduct collaborative research abroad, places Patterson in rare company at Northeastern. Of Northeastern’s 117 faculty Fulbright recipients, only 10 have received top-tier honors, such as Distinguished Scholar, Distinguished Chair or Research Chair awards — and Patterson now holds two of them, said Sierra Muñoz, an outreach program coordinator with the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences.
Patterson’s first Fulbright, which took place during the 2021-22 academic year in Québec, was an opportunity to do further work on an autonomous underwater robot — named “Fetch” — that he had developed and had been deployed to study krill populations in the Antarctic ocean and sea sponges that killed coral in reefs in the Caribbean.
After receiving a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to collaborate with Université Laval in Quebec City in 2021, Patterson was able to use Fetch to plum kelp forests in the Canadian Arctic to study how warming oceans were reshaping the region’s marine ecosystems and food webs.
From the Canadian Arctic, Patterson turned his attention to Iceland in part to help a region that he said is “really concerned with sustainability and marine conservation.” He said he has been fascinated with hydrothermal vents since his first encounter with them during a sabbatical in 2008.
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First discovered in the late 1970s near the Galápagos Islands, hydrothermal vents exist all over the planet, typically thousands of meters beneath the ocean’s surface along “mid-ocean ridges” where tectonic plates slowly pull apart, he said. Most are far too deep for humans to visit directly. But a rare handful occur in shallow water, such as those found in Eyjafjörður — they sit just 50 feet beneath the surface.
Over the next year, he and a team of researchers will use sensors and sampling equipment to determine whether microplastics — the tiny plastic particles that permeate oceans worldwide — are accumulating around the vents and posing a threat to the ecosystem. Patterson said that many of the filter-feeding animals living there, such as mussels and tube worms, survive by filtering plankton from the water; but he wants to know if dense communities of those organisms are similarly ingesting microplastics.
There’s “a new kind of plankton out there that isn’t plankton,” Patterson said.
The Icelandic vents are especially unusual not simply because of their accessibility, but also because of the chemistry of the water erupting from them.
Patterson said the vents may sustain so much life, somewhat counterintuitively, as a result of mass plankton die-offs. As tides sweep those microscopic organisms through the fjord, the sudden influx of ancient freshwater pouring from the vents creates a sharp salinity shift that many plankton cannot survive.
The tiny, fragile life forms simply “croak” from all that salt, he said. Their remains then drift down onto the seafloor, effectively creating a steady stream of food for the dense ecosystem clustered around the vents. “So it’s like there’s this huge food subsidy because of the vents that’s feeding the entire seafloor around these vents,” Patterson said. “That’s probably, in part, why it’s such an oasis of life.”
