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The images displayed on the wall of screens in front of me (Marlow) show a shadowy, alien world, with bizarre life forms moving in and out of frame like apparitions. Slow-moving crabs dance precariously on submerged cliff sides, bug-eyed pink rockfish hug the crevasses, and serpentine fish slither across the sediment in search of food. It’s September 2011, and my fellow scientists and I are bobbing comfortably aboard the research vessel Atlantis on the surface of the eastern Pacific Ocean. Seven hundred meters below, the robotic craft Jason dangles beneath the ship, exploring a marine methane seep known as Hydrate Ridge while skirting calcium carbonate mounds that rise hundreds of meters above the seafloor.
At Hydrate Ridge and many similar sites around the world, methane ...
