The question of how life began on Earth remains one of the most profound mysteries in science. Known as abiogenesis, it concerns the transition from simple chemical systems to self-replicating, metabolically active organisms. Modern research combines evidence from chemistry, geology, and planetary science to reconstruct the steps that may have led from inert matter to the first living systems. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth formed from the dust and debris surrounding the young Sun. Intense volcanic activity, frequent meteor impacts, and a reducing atmosphere of methane, ammonia, and water vapor created a chemically dynamic planet. As the planet cooled, liquid water accumulated in the basins that became the first oceans. These early conditions likely provided the setting for prebiotic chemistry. I will start with the geospatial analysis and later discuss significance and theory behind the study. I will complete the discussion with the theory of the continuous origin of life on our planet.

I am conducting this analysis because I enjoy exploring life and contributing to its preservation within the boundaries of our planet. It gives me immense pleasure to learn about and understand it more deeply.

Hydrothermal vents analysis

#

I started with the InterRidge Global Database of Active Submarine Hydrothermal Vent Fields (v 3.4) which contains about 721 vent fields, with 666 active (also Inferred) and 55 inactive. I removed the inactive vents from the dataset. Here are the geographical locations of all the vents. The geographical distribution of the remaining vents shows that they are generally aligned along south-north snake like pattern, tracing the boundaries of the continental plates.. It makes sense since hydrothermal vents are a symptom and consequence of plate tectonics, they form where plates move apart or collide.

Next, I took snapshots of satellite images for the vent locations. There is much to learn simply by observing these areas visually. I used two different resolutions, one of which provides a closer view, though much of the deep-sea imagery is missing at that scale. Even from the available images, it is possible to infer a great deal about the vent locations.

By examining the depth histogram of the vents, I can classify them into three categories: deep-sea vents, shallow vents, and on-land vents.

From the Satellite Images, the deep sea vents show no visible features on the surface. Therefore, I began with the shallow vents, filtering the dataset by depth. This subset still includes some land-based vents. There is a considerable amount of missing data in the dataset, and filling these gaps would be an interesting and valuable exercise.

Examples

#

Quick look at the Panarea vent area near Sicily and the surrounding seafloor context.

You can clearly see the fracture zone from satellite imagery, it’s fascinating to observe this structure. Learn more about the Vema Fracture Zone on Wikipedia. . A lot of these vents are present in very beautiful geographical structures.

Here is another example from the Galápagos region. The Galápagos hydrothermal mounds are large seafloor structures in the Galápagos Rift formed by slow-moving, mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids. This area is historically significant—it was the site of the first discovery of hydrothermal vents and their unique deep-sea life during the 1977 Galápagos Rift expedition. No one had expected to find such thriving biological communities, so there were no deep-sea biologists on that cruise. Read more on WHOI’s history of hydrothermal vent discovery.

As you can see, not much is visible from satellite images, but beneath the surface lies a very different story. it is a very nice temperature gradient present even up to a 1000m.

Plans for Iteration 2:

#

This is it for now, I need to write a series of analytical tools that should go nicely with this data. In the next iteration, My plans include train a machine learning image classifier to infer feature labels and determine more filters to reduce the data. Based on my initial observations, I doubt the model will detect much beyond what is already visible to the human eye; however, I’m still curious to build the system and test its capabilities.

I also aim to develop a bathymetry-based system to classify and separate the land and sea portions of these vent sites. Additionally, I plan to train a series of detectors using various sensor data and attempt to correlate their outputs with known sightings of life from the dataset.

Another question I’ve been exploring is: Are deep vents or shallow vents more favorable for biological activity?

To help answer this, I need to compare the vent dynamics with those of the regular ocean. For this, I use control samples. Fortunately, creating controls is relatively straightforward in the ocean, you can simply select adjacent bounding boxes around vent sites and analyze the same parameters within them for comparison.

Now I am returning to the broader question of why these vents matter for life, and discuss the theory of the continuous origin of life on our planet.

The Chemical Origins of complex life

#

Experiments such as the Miller-Urey synthesis in 1953 demonstrated that simple organic molecules can form spontaneously under simulated early Earth conditions. Amino acids, nucleotides, and simple sugars have been shown to arise from mixtures of gases energized by lightning or ultraviolet radiation. Over time, these molecules could have concentrated in shallow pools, ice films, or mineral surfaces, creating environments that favored the formation of life as we know it. Life emerged from the water onto land through a gradual process of adaptation, starting with plants and microbes colonizing shallow, coastal areas around 530 million years ago, followed by arthropods like insects, and later vertebrates, over hundreds of millions of years.

Role of Hydrothermal Vents for formation of life

#

Hydrothermal underwater vents provide another promising environment. These vents release mineral-rich fluids that create strong chemical gradients, which could drive energy-releasing reactions. The iron-sulfur surfaces found at these sites can catalyze organic synthesis, and modern vent ecosystems demonstrate that life can thrive without sunlight, relying instead on chemical energy from Earth’s interior. These vents are also home to the third type of life on earth known as Archea (the other two classes are Bacteria and Eukaryotes). A special class of Archea thrives near these vents. Known as thermophiles, they can survive at relatively high temperatures, some thermophiles may be bacteria and fungi but an overwhelming majority of them are Archea. The discovery of such as diverse biological communities around vents on the ocean floor supports the idea that life could have originated in such environments. These ecosystems depend on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis, indicating that early life might not have required sunlight. The mineral structures at vents also provide natural compartments, potentially serving as precursors to biological membranes. If life emerged naturally from chemistry on our planet, similar processes might operate on other worlds with water and energy sources.

Observing Hydrothermal Vent Regions from Space

#

While hydrothermal vents lie thousands of meters below the ocean surface, satellites can provide valuable information about the conditions in the waters above the vents. Models to detect vents and monitor them remotely can be developed. Further more, we can get time series information from the sensors to see how the vents progress over space and time. These datasets can be used to identify anomalies in productivity or circulation patterns near known vent fields. Satellite data can reveal the large-scale environmental context, temperature gradients, plankton blooms, and nutrient distributions from the vents.

Is Life Still Emerging Today?

#

Most scientists consider life to have originated once on the early Earth, about four billion years ago, and to have diversified ever since. Yet some researchers propose that the process of abiogenesis could still occur in suitable environments such as hydrothermal vents. These systems continue to produce organic compounds abiotically, suggesting that the physical and chemical conditions that once gave rise to life persist today. This perspective holds that life may be a continuous natural outcome of geochemical processes rather than a singular historical event. Alkaline hydrothermal vents still generate strong chemical gradients and host catalytic mineral surfaces similar to those that might have existed on the early Earth. Laboratory experiments have shown that under vent-like conditions, simple organics and even peptide chains can form spontaneously.

If abiogenesis is still occurring, why do we not observe new life emerging? One explanation is that the modern biosphere is already saturated with efficient microorganisms that outcompete or degrade any nascent prebiotic systems. New protocells would be destroyed or assimilated before they could evolve into independent organisms. In this view, continuous abiogenesis may happen invisibly within the shadow of existing life. Second, how would we detect it, the remoteness of these sites and lack of methods to detect how a new life would also hinder the process of detection. It is an extreme challenge to develop methods for this. The line between chemistry and biology could therefore be crossed more often than we assume, making life a recurring planetary phenomenon rather than a rare historical accident.

References and Further Reading

#

1. Miller, S. L. (1953). A production of amino acids under possible primitive Earth conditions. Science, 117(3046), 528–529. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.117.3046.528
2. Martin, W., Baross, J., Kelley, D., & Russell, M. J. (2008). Hydrothermal vents and the origin of life. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 6(11), 805–814. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1991
3. Gilbert, W. (1986). The RNA World. Nature, 319, 618. https://doi.org/10.1038/319618a0
4. Wächtershäuser, G. (1988). Before enzymes and templates: theory of surface metabolism. Microbiological Reviews, 52(4), 452–484. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3070320
5. Martin, W., & Russell, M. J. (2003). On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 358(1429), 59–85. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2002.1183
6. Lane, N., Allen, J. F., & Martin, W. (2010). How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the origin of life. BioEssays, 32(4), 271–280. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.200900131
7. Cleland, C. E., & Copley, S. D. (2005). The possibility of alternative microbial life on Earth. International Journal of Astrobiology, 4(3–4), 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550405002550

8. Beaulieu, Stace E ; Szafrański, Kamil M (2020): InterRidge Global Database of Active Submarine Hydrothermal Vent Fields Version 3.4 [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.917894

   #