Most of the life that we know is dependent on light is driven by photosynthesis. In the deep sea there is no light and it's always cold, it's always around 2 degrees Celsius. And so the organisms cannot live off of light, they have to live off of either the material that's coming from the photoxone, from the top,

or they have to produce their energy in an entirely different way, using for example methane or sulfide or chemical energy sources. The mud volcano that I study is called Hakomospi mud volcano. And although it's called volcano, it's not like a terrestrial volcano that we have in mind.

It's a very flat structure and the material it erupts is not molten rock, it is warm subsurface mud. And when the muds come up, they're very different from what they look like after 1 year, after 2 years, after 5 years, after 1000 years. And they carry already organisms from the subsurface.

So they have a microbial signature that looks like basically what you would find in very deep layers of the sediment. You could say that we look at the evolution of ecosystems. What we see at Hakomospi is in the middle where the communities just start to develop, the methanotrophic communities.

Most of the methane that is emitted still enters the water column and is consumed by methanotrophic organisms in the water column. The older the muds get, the more time these populations have to develop, the more methane is actually consumed in the sediment. It takes a very long time for an efficient methanotrophic community or population to establish.

So that means that if we want those organisms to keep eating the methane before it enters the water column and possibly the atmosphere, then we should probably protect those ecosystems from bottom trawling and other anthropogenic impacts.

It's like a rainforest that takes thousands of years to grow back if you want to destroy it.