Deep-Sea Vents: Life Without Sunlight

This dataset is a movie about life at deep-sea hydrothermal vents, formatted specifically for NOAA's Science On a Sphere. Viewers experience virtual dives beneath the sunlit ocean to the darkness of deep-sea vents, where hot water spews from the seafloor and fuels food webs based on chemosynthesis. Vents in different regions of the ocean have different animal species. The movie tours Earth's plate boundaries to show where deep-sea vents have been discovered, interweaving global datasets with imagery of the seafloor obtained from deep-diving vehicles.

The movie is aligned with the following Earth Science Literacy Principles and Ocean Literacy Principles:

• Earth System Literacy Principal 3.2: Earth is a complex system of interacting rock, water, air, and life.
• Ocean Literacy Principal 5.g.: There are deep ocean ecosystems that are independent of energy from sunlight and photosynthetic organisms.
• Ocean Literacy Principal 7.a.: The ocean is the last and largest unexplored place on Earth.

Also available is a full live program of datasets, including scripts and playlists, found in the Live Programs catalog.

Length of dataset: 4:59