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This article is adapted from a longer piece in Duke Environment Magazine.

A mile and a half beneath the Pacific Ocean, a new world opened up for Cindy Van Dover.

It was 1985, and Van Dover, then just months shy of earning her master’s degree in theoretical ecology at UCLA, was making her first dive in the submersible research vessel Alvin. As the pilot guided the Volkswagen-sized sub into the inky depths of the Galapagos Rift, 2,450 meters below the surface, Van Dover was stunned by what she saw.

Outside her view port, Alvin’s headlights illuminated dense clumps of slender, sleeve-like white tubes rising up from the sea floor with blood-red plumes poking out of their tips like giant lipsticks. Ghostly white crabs and eel-like fish darted between the clumps. Smoke billowed out of lopsided, chimney-like rock formations, and jets of superheated water bubbled up through cracks in the sea floor.

It was the famed Rose Garden hydrothermal vent, an otherworldly sea-floor oasis discovered in 1977 in the waters near the Galapagos Islands, and so named because some scientists thought its tubeworms resembled clusters of long-stemmed roses. (See slideshow of hydrothermal creatures)

“I remember thinking how extraordinary it was to be there, in this place at the bottom of the sea where humans weren’t supposed to be, and to look out my view port and see a sunless environment filled with animals that were living without input from photosynthesis,” says Van Dover, 52, an internationally respected deep-sea biologist and director of the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC.

“It was amazing, like nothing I had ever experienced before,” she says. “My heart was pounding and my adrenaline was pumping. I was hooked.”

She’s been diving—figuratively and literally—into uncharted waters ever since. Drawn by the alien beauty of the vent ecosystems and by the scientific puzzles they pose, Van Dover has made more than 100 dives in Alvin and other submersibles. She’s explored nearly every known vent site in the world, once diving as deep as 4,000 meters in a Russian sub.

In 1990 she became the only PhD scientist and only woman ever to complete the rigorous training necessary to be an Alvin pilot. “It didn’t seem like such a big leap to me,” she says. “If you’re an ecologist, you want to be in the environment you study. On a research cruise, no one spends more time undersea than the sub’s pilots. So to be the best scientist I could be, I realized I had to become a pilot.”

Since then, she’s been pilot-in-command on 48 dives.

Van Dover has published more than 70 peer-reviewed publications in Science, Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geophysical Research Letters and other top journals. She also wrote The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents, the first textbook on the subject, published in 2000 by Princeton University Press.

“That first dive, you really appreciate how extraordinary it is for you to be there,” she says. “You realize the enormity of it—you’re a mile and a half below the ocean in a sub that’s not much bigger than a two-person bathtub. And outside the view port is this other world, this strange world of alien formations and bizarre animals unexpectedly thriving in the most extreme conditions on Earth.” (What’s it like? See Video)

The ocean is pitch black—no sunlight ever penetrates that deep—and the pressure is so intense it would crush a human’s lungs instantly. The water around the vents is, within inches, hotter than boiling or nearly freezing. The particles and fluid rising like smoke from the chimney-like rock formations are toxic to some species. (The octopus’s garden. See Video.)

Yet despite these extreme conditions, many species, particularly invertebrates such as mussels, clams, crabs, shrimp, sea anemones and tubeworms, flourish there. They get all the nutrients they need from the superheated chemical soup spewing out of the vents, far removed from the sunlight that sustains the foodweb here on the surface.

“Our understanding of where life originated on Earth has been affected by our study of hydrothermal vents and deep-sea ecology,” she says. “It even helps guide how we look for life on other planets.”

The knowledge gained from studying the vent sites has benefits that extend far beyond the field of marine biology, she believes.

By studying vents and the ecosystems surrounding them, scientists have increased their knowledge of volcanic systems. They’ve learned more about how undersea ore deposits form, and how to find those deposits. Vent studies have yielded new information about extremeophiles — microorganisms that can adapt to high temperatures, high pressures and toxic environments, and which may have uses in industry, medicine and exploration.

“It’s like a fantasy world, a scene out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Van Dover says. “You want to share the experience with people. It seems too glorious to keep to yourself. It’s like being the first person to step on the moon. You want the whole world to experience it, too.”

Produced by: Tim Lucas, national media relations and marketing specialist for the Nicholas School and the Nicholas Institute.