Go
Deeper.

The expedition's goal was to find more vent fields like "Lost City" — the alkaline, carbonate-spire vents first discovered in 2000, formed not by volcanic heat but by a chemical reaction between seawater and exposed mantle rock called serpentinization. Scientists believe these vents may represent conditions similar to those that facilitated the origin of life on Earth, possibly on other planets too. Only a handful had ever been found.

Using ROV SuBastian, we found three new black smoker vent sites — not the Lost City-type vents we were searching for, but a significant discovery in their own right. Dense communities of vent-specific fauna never before documented at these locations. I led the photogrammetry component, building 3D reconstructions of the vent structures from ROV imagery — baseline data that lets us track how these landscapes change over time.

While onboard, I communicated the discoveries in real time through X (formerly Twitter), reaching over 220,000 impressions — because discoveries like this deserve to be shared as they happen.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone — where the Juan de Fuca Plate slides beneath North America — shapes everything from the region's earthquake risk to its deep-sea habitats. This expedition collected high-resolution seafloor mapping data and benthic core samples, giving us a clearer picture of what lives on and in the sediment of this dynamic system.

My primary role was collecting multibeam and echosounder data — high-resolution seafloor mapping that captures the topography and physical structure of the subduction zone. I also helped with benthic invertebrate identification from core samples. This kind of foundational data — from places that are rarely visited — is what makes future monitoring and modelling possible.

Descending in Alvin takes over an hour. The light goes slowly — reds first, then everything else, until there's nothing left but the deepest blue and then dark. And then the bioluminescence starts. As we moved downward, flashes of light streaked past the windows — it looked like fireworks going upward, though really it was us moving through them. Creatures you can't even name, lighting up as the sub passed. It was magic. By the time you reach the bottom, you're in a world lit only by those flickers and the sub's floodlights. The scale of it is hard to describe.

The work I was doing — laying out a permanent transect that other researchers will return to in years and decades — carries a particular weight when you're actually sitting on the seafloor doing it. You're making a mark that's meant to outlast the expedition.