Rachel Mills exploring the sea floor

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Rachel Mills is a marine geochemist who studies the sea floor and hydrothermal vents, where water erupts from the earth's crust at 360 degrees. The thick plumes emit many metals such as copper, gold, iron and rare earth minerals that are deposited on the sea bed. Rachel's career has taken her all over the world and 4km deep under the ocean in small submersibles. These journeys are exciting and terrifying as samples are taken to understand how the metals travel many thousands of miles. The metals are involved in creating nutrients that supply the ocean's food chain and control carbon uptake. There is also a lot of interest in mining the valuable deposits but can this be done without upsetting the ocean's eco-system?

Transcript

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0:35.0	Today a journey into the deep where my guest explores the exotic ecosystems around volcanically active vents on the ocean bed, areas that are inhabited by bizarre and alien creatures, and rich sources of metals like iron, gold, copper, and rare earth minerals expelled from the earth's crust.
0:53.0	Professor Rachel Mills, a marine geochemist,
0:56.0	is fascinated by the function of the metals,
0:58.0	which are deposited on the sea floor
1:00.0	as a result of the high temperature fluids
1:02.0	erupting out of the rocks.
1:04.0	Now, Dean of the Faculty of Natural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton,
1:09.0	her aim is to understand how metals from these sites, known as hydrothermal vents spread throughout the oceans.
1:16.0	Their importance in creating nutrients for the rest of the marine world is becoming ever more significant,
1:21.0	because as interest in mining these valuable metals
1:24.2	from the sea bed grows, so too does our understanding of the crucial role the oceans
	...

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