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Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with my favorite astrophysicist, Regina G. Barber. Thank you, M. I'm glad I'm your favorite. Am I the only astrophysicist? You're the only astrophysicist I know, so as long as I don't mean another one. We are back with our next installment of Sea Camp, our summer series that dives deeper each week into the wonders and mysteries of the ocean.

Yes, so many mysteries.

It's been such an incredible series, honestly.

You last week and producer Hannah Chin were hanging out in the Midnight Zone with Deep Sea Giants.

Where are we going today?

So today we're exploring this really cool phenomenon that

happens in both the midnight zone. That's the one we just visited. And the zone below it,

the abysopalagic. This is what we would call the abyss. Very interesting, very eerie.

I'm ready to go to the abyss. Yeah. And this sounds like our sea camp tour guide, Noel Bolin, yes, a marine biologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Yeah, she says the abyssal zone is interesting because, as we learned in the last episode, the average depth of the ocean floor is 4,000 meters.

And that's where this zone starts, which means it's only in certain places of the ocean around the world that you get into the abysopalajic.

Hmm.

Those lucky places are 4,000 to 6,000 meters underwater, and they're the home to today's topic.

I'm so excited.

Hydro thermal vents.

Oh, these are these underwater mini volcano looking things that

spew hot water and all these extremophiles, all these critters that are adopted to live there,

will live on them. Yes, exactly. They were first discovered in the 70s when scientists dragged a probe

across the ocean floor, and they detected these huge temperature differences, and they were

...