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Mysteries of the Deep premiered November 26, 2002:

				The Uncivilized Machine of War Historians raise the world's first successful submarine from her watery grave.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: In a quiet corner of MagnoliaCemetery, eight men are buried. One of them is Horace Hunley-- the man who gave his name, his energy, his enthusiasm and finally his life to an extraordinary machine. All eight men drowned in a training accident in the submarine H.L. Hunley. This is the Hunley today-- a priceless relic of the Civil War, but also a war grave. On February 17, 1864, four months after the training accident, a new crew took the Hunley to sea and carried out history's first successful submarine attack. They never returned. It's a hot August day, 136 years after the Hunley vanished. A few miles out from Charleston Harbor, the sub is about to reappear. ( cheering ) ( cheering, applause ) Cradled in a specially built frame, the Hunley has been gently hoisted 30 feet from the floor of the Atlantic. She's coming to the old Charleston Navy Yard, and into the hands of a team of archaeologists. The Hunley is surprisingly well preserved-- probably because soon after sinking she was covered by sediment. The hull has about half an inch of rust and marine growth, but the structure's sound. The interior is completely filled with sediment-- that's what the archaeologists will go to work on. This is all the controls for the tank area... and here's the Hunley. God, it's really... Can you see how small it is? It's really small. Isn't that your first reaction: "How could people get inside?" It's so tiny. How many guys were in there? Nine men. Nine people. Nine men. The Confederacy wasn't the only group of people working on submarines-- at the same time, they were working on them in the North. What do you suppose the difference was? Why didn't they have the first successful submarine? I think that's a great question, Alan. I think it's "desperate times call for desperate measures." The blockade was taking its toll, the South was in the process where it became evident that they were starting to lose the war. And they had to free the blockade, they had to restart the trade in and out of Charleston, they had to communicate with the outside world. They were forced to it. ALDA: War became inevitable when in 1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union, soon followed by the five other Confederate states. Attention focused on Fort Sumter, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, to which all the Union forces in the area had withdrawn. For four months there was a standoff. Finally, Confederate batteries opened fire, and after 34 hours the fort surrendered. With Sumter securely in Confederate hands, Charleston Harbor became the South's vital strategic link to Europe. The North set up a naval blockade-- a dozen or more warships in a ring around the harbor entrance, far enough off shore to be out of range of shore batteries. Charleston Harbor was fought over for the rest of the war. Fast Confederate blockade runners attempted to race in and out of the port. The new ironclads were used by both sides, with the Union mounting several attacks on Sumter and the other harbor forts, but to no avail. Then in August 1863, the South brought into Charleston from Mobile, Alabama, a secret weapon which they hoped would decisively tip the balance. It vas called a "torpedo fish" or "torpedo boat." Now we call them submarines. It's an emotional love story, too. So it's got elements for everybody. It's just phenomenal. ALDA: Warren Lasch is the Charleston businessman who's pulled the Hunley recovery project together. In the process, he's become a Civil War expert. The lifeblood of Charleston was its trade-- its textiles, its cotton-- that would ship to Britain and other trading partners. The intent of the North was to choke Charleston with this blockade, not only from a commercial perspective, but that also was... running the blockade was its only way of communication with the outside world. Is that Fort Sumter over there? Yes, right here, this is Fort Sumter. To the left we have the opening to the harbor. And further to the left... Over here is a lighthouse that's called the "Sullivan's Island Light." Directly east, out to sea, is where the Hunley engaged the Housatonic and sunk her. ALDA: Charleston was the Confederacy's only East Coast port, yet it was being strangled by the Union's much more powerful navy. When the Hunley sank the USS Housatonic, Charleston itself was coming under increasing pressure. In the summer of 1863, Union forces had taken Morris Island and set up batteries which threatened the entire harbor and the city. An enormous gun, the "Swamp Angel," lobbed 200-pound shells into the streets. kwrKkcvc Fort Sumter came under heavy bombardment from the new Union positions, which were only about a mile away. The siege of Charleston was gathering force. Several nights a week, the Hunley-- stationed on Sullivan's Island-- put to sea in an attempt to reach the blockading ships. It was dangerous work. 13 men had already died in her during training. And it was tough work. Her propeller was hand-cranked, so getting a few miles offshore took hours of exhausting labor. On the night of February 17, 1864, four miles off Sullivan's Island, the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic came into view. But then the Housatonic saw the Hunley. LASCH: General Beauregard, who was in charge of the defense of Charleston, had said several times after the first two crews had perished that the Hunley is more dangerous to its crew than it is to the enemy. So he basically ordered the Hunley to attack on the surface, which took away one of its big, big advantages: its stealth. ALDA: Although she was capable of submerging completely, the Hunley attacked semi-submerged. For a vital few seconds, the lookout on the Housatonic was not quite sure what he'd seen. By the time he realized it was something that was a threat to the Housatonic... he sounded general quarters, but the Hunley was too close, so they couldn't lower their cannons low enough to get an angle. So people came on deck and started firing upon the Hunley with small arms fire and rifles. ALDA: The Hunley jammed its torpedo, with a harpoon tip, into the Housatonic's wooden hull. The men backed away, then pulled a rope attached to a trigger on the torpedo. The Housatonic sank within three minutes, but with surprisingly few casualties: five men were killed, with the rest of the crew picked up by other blockade ships. But what about the Hunley? The system was that the Hunley would signal success by flashing a blue lantern. Oh, that doesn't mean that they were coming back on the surface of the water-- they had some kind of periscope or something? No, no, they were going to come back on the surface. Oh. Oh, absolutely. They signaled shore with a blue lantern. They were on the surface, opened the conning tower and somebody signaled shore. And two different people saw the lantern. One of them was a sentry on Sullivan's Island that lit a campfire to guide the Hunley to come back. ALDA: But she didn't come back. She was lost. She stayed lost until a team led by the author and shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler found the sub in 1995, after 14 years of searching. Cussler used a towed magnetometer to detect the Hunley's hull, which was completely covered by silt. The sub was farther out to sea than where the Housatonic had sunk-- not where you'd expect her to be if she was already on the way back. It took five years to complete the plans and raise the money to recover the Hunley. The big concern was that the hull would break up while being lifted. Working in near zero visibility, divers placed a line of slings along the entire length, padded with plastic foam. The slings were attached to a massive steel frame placed over the sub. The whole assembly would then be raised in one piece. Everything went without a hitch. Today the Hunley lies suspendedn in the same slings inside a huge tank on the dock at the Charleston Navy Yard. When work's not under way, the tank is filled with chilled fresh water to wash out the salt and minimize corrosion. Naval historians have been surprised at the Hunley's technical sophistication. Horace Hunley, who was a wealthy New Orleans lawyer, had pulled together a team of first-rate engineers. The hull was based on a steam boiler, but much modified. Everything was streamlined: rivets were finished flush, and tapered sections were added fore and aft. Buoyancy was regulated with two ballast tanks, with hand pumps to alter water levels. Dive planes, controlled by the captain, adjusted the sub's dive angle. There was a heavy ballast keel, which could be dropped from inside in an emergency, although no crew ever managed to do that. And there were two snorkel tubes with leather bellows to bring in fresh air while submerged. A 20-foot spar carried the torpedo-- 135 pounds of black powder, with a rope trigger leading back to the sub. The spar was still attached when the sub was found, then removed before the recovery operation. MAN: Very good. ALDA: Okay, close the door? Yeah. ALDA: One advantage of the Hunley sitting on the bottom for 136 years is that now advanced analytical tools are available. This is a state-of-the-art digital X-ray system. MAN: Look at that. ALDA: Yeah, amazing. And you're looking at something which is maybe completely gone. The iron has left the object and gone into the encrustation around it. ALDA: So what that means, it seems to me, is that if you chipped away the encrustation, you would never see the threads, because you don't get down to the threads, the threads no longer exist. They're now in the encrustation. Exactly. ALDA: It's taken the archaeologists more than a year to excavate the Hunley's interior-- tons of silt removed a spoonful at a time. Skeletons of all eight crew members-- with their clothing, their shoes, their personal possessions-- have been recovered. The human remains will eventually be buried with Horace Hunley and the other crew in Magnolia Cemetery. There's a high level of preservation, because the fine silt shut out oxygen. MAN: Oh, and look at that. Unbelievable. ALDA: It's believed that the crew were all Confederate soldiers. Here's one man's pipe-- did they smoke down there? A lead pencil. A thimble-- soldiers did their own sewing. Many different kinds of buttons, including one from a uniform of the Union Navy, where one crewman must have served before the war. And here's a Union soldier's I.D. tag-- probably a battlefield trophy. A matchstick and the candle it was used to light-- perhaps just for a moment-- to read the compass. Maria Jacobsen, the project's Danish head archaeologist, learned her trade excavating Viking longboats-- a trade which mainly seems to involve unpleasant working conditions. What's all this stuff here? JACOBSEN: What you're looking at is the forward end of the crew compartment. and this is the forward pump that controlled the water level in the forward ballast tank. This is probably the handle to operate the pump, and the crew members would sit on this wooden bench. There was only three and a half feet between the edge of the bench to the starboard side. ALDA: But look how little room there is between the seat, between the bench and the top of this. They must have been bent over like this. One of the things we wondered about-- because all the men sat on one side-- how did they balance the sub? Did they have#8 a counterbalance over here? But I think we're learning now that the sub was so cramped, in fact, that when they were sitting at their stations, the heavy upper torso and head was directly above the center line of the sub. ALDA: So they balanced it automatically. Exactly. Okay, now, you know what I see now that I didn't get before is these handles were what they turned to move the ship. They sat there and turned the handles. ALDA: It's this hand-cranking that's the sub's most astonishing aspect. Horace Hunley's engineers had tried electric motors, but couldn't get enough power. Others tried steam, but that meant never submerging. Seven Hunley crewmen were there as human engines. The eighth was the captain. For the attack on the Housatonic, the captain was a young lieutenant, George Dixon, who'd been wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. Maria Jacobsen will never forget that connection. Dixon's body was identified? Uh, yes. He had a very significant artifact on him-- the golden coin that was given to him by his sweetheart, Queenie Bennett. ALDA: The gold coin that Queenie Bennett gave Dixon had saved his life at Shiloh-- it had stopped a bullet. I got it. WOMAN: Really? Mm-hmm. MAN: Say the words. I have the gold coin right here. MAN: You feel it in your fingers? Oh, I feel it in my fingers, oh, I do. ( woman gasps ): Oh, my God! Oh, my God, oh, my God! MAN: Oh, man, I got chill bumps! WOMAN: I have the chills! MAN: Oh, my God, look at that! MAN 2: Holy crap, there it is. MAN 1: Oh, is that fantastic or what? Maria, why are you shaking? JACOBSEN: Why do you think I'm shaking? ( laughing ) Not only was it very clearly a gold piece that had been hit by a projectile, but he had actually had it inscribed as a memento of... What did it say on it? It said, "Shiloh, April 6, 1862. My Life Preserver." ALDA: Why could Dixon not bring the Hunley back that night? The sub is clearly damaged. There's a gash in the stern and there's a hole in the forward conning tower. It's plugged here with white foam. Was the damage perhaps caused by a collision with one of the other blockade ships racing to the aid of the Housatonic? The silt deposits seem to say no. There's a tell-tale band of coarse material halfway up the inside. For Maria, that's significant. So does that indicate to you that that coarse material came in through a larger opening than the fine silt? JACOBSEN: Exactly, exactly. Because it's a later deposit and it's scouring into the existing sediment, it tells me it occurred afterwards. ALDA: If coarser sediment could only get in after half of the fine material entered, that means the large holes in the hull happened after the sub sank-- probably caused by a ship's anchor or fishing gear. The project's high-tech equipment may be pointing in a different direction than a collision. This is the cover of the forward hatch here, okay, and this is the hatch itself. Now, if you measure this... At the front of the conning tower, there's a gap. If you play on the density, you see it's black. It means that there's no density. That's rubber. This is a rubber seal that sealed the submarine. ALDA: Now, why is the rubber thicker here than it is over here? You are going to draw the conclusion yourself. I'm guessing there was some kind of a leak here or some kind of a separation. MARDIKIAN: Or it's open. You think it's definitely open? My theory is that this is unlocked. The closing mechanism is unlocked. The hinge is over here, so it's compressing this part of the rubber, but it's not compressing this because it's not tied down. And the rubber itself has a tendency to pop up. The rubber pushes back if you're not locking it in place. Right, exactly, you've got it. ALDA: If the crew really did signal their success on the surface after the attack-- which means they'd survived their own explosion-- then something subsequently made them dive the boat. Maybe in a hurry, rushing to avoid an approaching ship, they didn't fully lock the hatch and it sprang open. We'll probably never know. Somehow this "engine of war not recognized by civilized nations"-- as a Union admiral described it-- went to the bottom.

				Into the Deep, Part 1 Alan Alda joins explorer Bob Ballard for a look at the technologies that have opened up the farthest reaches of the ocean.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: MAN: You can be anywhere you want through telepresence, so I decided, "Why not here?" ALDA: One recent afternoon, I found myself walking along a hillside overlooking the Connecticut River in the company of one of the world's greatest explorers, Bob Ballard. ALDA: How long do you think it will be before you're... under the ocean and never leaving your house? BALLARD: Right now, probably any time I want to do it. Really? ALDA: After 30 years of extraordinary successes opening up the mysteries of the deep ocean, Ballard now advocates a new kind of exploration, using remote control. BALLARD: Oh, yeah, but I won't have to... ALDA: It's the latest phase of a career that spans more than a hundred ocean expeditions, including at least a couple of scientific revolutions. We're going to devote this program to those expeditions, to those revolutions and to revealing the inner workings of our planet. ALDA: You seem to have been present at some of the greatest discoveries... and not only about the ocean, but about the planet. My strength is in the technology I developed. I've sort of used the technology as my passport to explore anything. And so, I have a love of geology, but I have an equal love of anthropology. And, fortunately, they're all under water. ( Alda laughing ) I got the only, you know, key to the car, so to speak, and that's been how I've been able to be at a particular point in human history when we've gone beneath the sea. TECHNICIAN: Have a good one. ( hatch hinges creaking ) TECHNICIAN: Sealing the hatch. PILOT: Hatch is secure. ALDA: This is the Alvin, a three-person submersible that's made more deep-ocean discoveries than any other sub, often with Ballard on board. Launched in 1964, Alvin is still going strong, diving for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Alvin's sister ship, the Turtle, was retired from the Navy in 1997. ALDA: Why is this called the Turtle? BALLARD: Well, it was really one of the earlier submarines; the first submarine ever built in America was the Turtle. Oh, really? BALLARD: And it attacked the British in the Revolutionary War. ALDA: Bob Ballard was a Woods Hole scientist for 30 years, while also a U.S. Navy officer, so he knows both subs well. All right. BALLARD: So this is the sail, and this actually floods, once you get out at sea. This is the important part, this is the hatch. Two inches thick... So, what keeps the water from going in here? Well, it's actually tapered. If you look at the hatch, it's like a porthole, and pressure pushes them down. In fact, you're most vulnerable at the surface. That's the most dangerous time. You don't have the pressure seating it. BALLARD: All right, well, let's get down inside here. So watch your step. ALDA: The heart of these deep-diving subs is the crew compartment-- a six-foot diameter steel sphere, built to withstand enormous forces. BALLARD: Absolutely a sardine. ALDA: My God, it's tiny! BALLARD: Oh, yeah. ALDA: Alvin can dive to 14,000 feet, where the water pressure outside is two and a half tons on every square inch of the sphere. ALDA: How long does it take you to get all the way down? Well, the average depth of the ocean is 12,000 feet. It takes you two-and-half hours each way, so you're talking five hours just commuting to work. And if you go even deeper, its even longer. PILOT: ID light on, request permission to dive. TECHNICIAN Roger. You're clear to dive. Depth here is 25-20. PILOT: Roger. Alvin diving. ALDA: With two 500-poundballast weights, the Alvin sinks at a steady 80 feet a minute. Gary, can you give me a vector to the target please? ( dispatch repeats over speakers ) ALDA: Sub and mother ship communicate with an acoustic phone, that echoes as it broadcasts sound directly into the water. TECHNICIAN: ...But you're 90 meters away. Target is at 0-8-0 degrees. Roger. Thank you. ( from speakers ): Roger. Thank you. ALDA: On the way down there's very little to do, and nothing to see unless you use the lights, but that consumes battery power that you'll need at the bottom. Eventually the pilot slows the sub's descent by dropping first one weight, then the second. PILOT: Okay, altitude is about 18 meters. Drop the second weight. You'll be able to hear it. ( speaker crackling ) Boom. BALLARD: You pop this, and then if you've done your ballast calculations right, you should stop. But everyone lies about their weight. Oh, you mean personally. Yeah, everyone lies, so I say, "Wait!" "Wait, Alan, you told me you were 180 pounds..." And we're still going! So then you have to go to what's called a "variable ballast system," and that's where you make up for the lying. And you start pumping ballast, and that will then take water outside and put it in a bag and that the bag, like a bladder, will expand and makes your volume bigger, and that slows you down until you finally get what's called "neutral trim." Now you're completely neutral; you're not falling or rising, and then you spend the last hundred feet and you drive down. When you get down there, you're really cold, huh? Oh, freezing. See, this hull is just two inches of steel and outside in the deep sea it's four degrees centigrade, I mean, it's just above freezing. And the ocean is like a giant heat sink. It just sucks the heat out of the submarine. Only thing that keeps you warm is your instrument panel. We can't afford the power to run a heater, because we're battery operated. ALDA: Maneuvering just above the bottom with their multiple propellers, deep submersibles like these have given scientists their first good look at the mysterious 70% of our planet that's covered by deep ocean. PILOT: This is Alvin, at the bottom. ALDA: It's been a slow process-- sometimes too slow for Bob Ballard-- but since the 1960s, it's truly a whole new world that's been revealed. BALLARD: We're going to a world that's totally dark-- complete darkness. We're going to be within a few feet of it, and it's... and there's no roads, so we're off track. ALDA: Yeah. We're going through the... over the ground and up and over and cliffs and walls and things like that. You don't want to go fast. In fact, the typical speed is like a half a mile an hour, and that's why it's so painfully slow. You get down here and if you're lucky, in three hours of bottom time you'll cover a mile. ALDA: In 1869, a hundred years before Alvin's launch, the French writer and ocean sailor Jules Verne published his classic story of the renegade scientist who travels the world's oceans in his fabulous submarine, Nautilus. None of Captain Nemo's technology existed at the time, of course, although in Hollywood's 1916 version the self-contained diving suits were a genuine technical advance. The adventures of Captain Nemo and his crew were an inspiration for generations of ocean explorers, including Jacques Cousteau and Bob Ballard. While some features of the Nautilus brilliantly foreshadowed later developments, Jules Verne did get one thing wrong-- the question of pressure. The design of submarines like the Nautilus, capable of accommodating large crews, developed rapidly during the Second Word War. Yet even the best of the German U-boats were limited to a depth of about 700 feet, and today's large submarines can go no deeper than a few thousand feet. It was Otis Barton, an engineer from Massachusetts, and his collaborator, William Beebe, who first solved the problem of how to reach extreme depths. The solution was to dive in a small, massive sphere-- they called it a "bathysphere." A spherical form offers the most effective resistance to the crushing pressures at depth. In a series of dives off Bermuda in the 1930s, they shattered the existing depth record of 525 feet, established by a diver in an armored suit. The bathysphere was simply lowered from a barge, a risky business since any fault in the cable would lead to a fatal plunge to the bottom. Beebe, who was a curator of birds at the Bronx Zoo, was greeted with disbelief when he reported seeing strange new creatures in the depths. We'll have a story about how right he was later in the program. It was the peculiar subs called "bathyscaphs," conceived by the Swiss balloonist Auguste Piccard in the 1930s, that finally reached the deepest part of the ocean-- the 35,000-foot Challenger Deep off Guam. A huge tank of gasoline provided flotation, so you didn't need a suspension cable. Bathyscaphs were safer, but very unwieldy, as Bob Ballard discovered. BALLARD: We were going in slow, but it's like if I just sort of took my hand and I had enough force to go right through this couch, you'd just see this... Well, that's what happened; the front of the submarine came down and I'm looking at it, and it's just the metal and everything... its just twisting in my eyes, like a giant just slowly, just very slowly, taking the submarine and just ripping it open. And then I see avgas... coming out. What's that? That's the flotation gasoline. We ruptured our tank. How did this turn out? Did you live? Well, here's what happened, you know. We then... he dropped the whole... then you could drop the whole door and he dropped ten tons. When he saw that, I said "Avgas!" When I yelled "Avgas," he dropped the doors open and we dropped ten tons. Now-- we're at 20,000 feet. It's a six-hour trip home. And here's what happens: you're leaking your gasoline and you start decelerating and then you start back down. Well, they had in the sub a little calculator-- you know one of those little LED displays? ( imitates electronic chirping ) Freezes up on a number? And so every few seconds, it was going... ( imitates gauge ) and telling you your ascent rate. Well, there was enough uncertainty in the calculation that it depended upon whether you were an optimist or a pessimist. You could get whatever you wanted out of those numbers. You didn't know whether you'd make it to the top before you lost the gasoline, which gave you the buoyancy. And then you'd go negative. And so we're looking... No one spoke. It was the most silent experience I've ever had. And we all looked at those numbers. For six hours? For six hours. ( imitating gauge ) And we were decelerating, because we were losing flotation. But we had enough to get home. ALDA: It was a technical breakthrough in the '60s that allowed the Alvin and her sister ships to shrink down to a practical size. Instead of a huge gasoline flotation tank, they used a new material called syntactic foam, packed inside a fiberglass shell. BALLARD: And what they were able to do is get rid of the gasoline, by taking... silicon, and they atomized it, and they made these little microspheres of glass with a little air in them. Billions of them. And it's sort of like a powder, but it has tremendous strength, but it weighs less than half of what seawater weighs. So by adding this foam, this is what basically makes the submarine float. ALDA: It turned out that the small, deep-diving subs were the perfect answer to a big question-- how to explore the vast undersea mountain range called the Mid-Ocean Ridge. During the decade of the 1950s, depth-sounding surveys had gradually revealed the Ridge as a 42,000-mile-long mountain range sometimes rising 15,000 feet above the sea floor, snaking around the globe between the continents. It's the largest geological feature on Earth. BALLARD: It really wasn't until 1960 that we knew that there was a great mountain range beneath the sea. But we didn't know how it got there. We didn't know the role it played in the earth-- until plate tectonics came along in the late '60s-- that we realized that it was actually the site of crustal creation, that it was along the axis of this great mountain range that the earth creates its outer skin, through this process called sea-floor spreading. And so we were the first human beings to go down in submarines and explore this mountain range. ALDA: The pictures of lava formations on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that Ballard filmed from the Alvin left no doubt that the mid-ocean ridges are volcanoes which create the earth's crust. And the next question was, where's the heat? In 1977, Ballard provided the answer with the discovery of hot water vents, 8,000 feet down on the Galapagos Rift. Then came the totally unexpected. Clustered around the vents were what seemed to be giant clams-- life, in the black ocean depths. It was the dawning of a scientific revolution which Ballard and the Alvin would pursue for the next several years. This picture you have =@>@.@?@.@on the wall. What is that a picture of? That is the moment of discovery of these life-forms. I think it's my proudest moment. People think maybe it was the Titanic. Actually, it wasn't. We didn't discover the Titanic, we knew it existed. It was the discovery of hydrothermal vents, these exotic creatures. See, prior to our discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977, we thought all life on our planet was due to the sun-- that the photosynthetic energy we get from the sun, that plants capture, turn into organic matter that animals then eat, and then we eat the animals, was it. Yeah. But then we discovered in the total darkness, in a world alien to anything we can think of, creatures that were living not off the energy of the sun, but the energy of the earth itself. ALDA: It was not until 1979 that Ballard was able to get back to the Galapagos Rift, and uncover the tremendous variety of life that lives around the vents-- the tube worms, mussels, crabs, even fish that shelter in the warm, volcanic currents. On the '79 expedition, Ballard, who's a geologist, was able to bring astonished biologists to see the vent life-forms for the first time. It was the beginning of a whole new branch of biology, still going strong, which has figured out how the vent life makes a living down here in the dark. It's turned out that it's the composition of the water emerging from the vent's that's the secret. These creatures were living off of chemicals... BALLARD: Exactly! Down in the... Poisonous, toxic... Poisonous to the rest of us. Absolutely, particularly hydrogen sulfide-- H2S. Fill this room with H2S, we're toast. So are the plants. Everything dies. But there was a creature, a bacterium, that had figured out, over eons of time, how to duplicate photosynthesis in the dark by oxidizing this poisonous gas. And a whole new life system came into being-- a life system that is now, we think, where life began on Earth. ALDA: It's believed the early Earth contained widespread hot spring environments like this-- both on land and in the ocean-- long before the earliest photosynthesizing organisms, like algae, began to evolve. So perhaps the sulfide-loving bacteria we see at the vents might be related to the earliest life