for National Geographic Today Along the Galápagos Rift, off the
storied Galápagos Islands, is a hotbed of volcanoes and
hydrothermal vents that spew boiling soups of metals, salts, and
poisonous gas. These seemingly inhospitable vents are home to
some of the toughest, most exotic life on Earth, including clams
and mussels as big as dinner plates and bright-white tubeworms
six feet long. The giant tubeworms, discovered during a
pathbreaking exploration of the rift in 1977, forced a
rethinking of life on the ocean floor. The rift lies 300 miles
(500 kilometers) north of the Galápagos Islands, and the
seafloor extends 8,000 feet (2,500 meters) below the waves. "The
rule of thumb was that only small organisms could occupy the
deep sea," says Tim Shank, a biologist at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and co-director of a
recent expedition to the Galápagos Rift organized to mark the
25th anniversary of the hydrothermal vent discovery. "We knew
there were microbial communities that could sur