Okay, okay, stop nagging! We're going down... but we first have to wait for the safety check on LEEAMITe. LEEAMITe? It's the transport vehicle that will take us down to the habitat. The name stands for... give me a second, this is tricky...I don't know how they come up with these names. I can't remember right now. The engineers are now checking that all of the life support systems on it are working properly. You don't want us to find that something is wrong with 3000m of water over us. How does it look like? You're so impatient! You'll be in it in a minute. There's not much to see. It's only a transport vehicle, so it doesn't have fancy equipment like the manned vehicle used in down in the vent. It's powered by lead-acid batteries, the same kind they use in cars, and propulsion is mainly to push it up and down. In short, it's a simple vehicle that serves it's purpose... transporting scientists and supplies. They've finished the checks. Come on, in you go.

The trip downwards is a long one. We're going down 3000m! Not as deep as the Marianas Trench of course, but still, it's a crushing depth. High pressure, pitch darkness, freezing cold... that's the kind of environment we had to build this habitat in. Yeah, we've had lots of engineering issues to cope with. It wasn't an easy job. But then, that's expected when you're doing something nobody has ever done before. Did I say cold? Yes, I did. The water in some regions of a vent system can be pretty hot, around 400 degree celsius, but the habitat is built one kilometer away from the vent system. Why? Can't you guess? We've been under lots of pressure from environmental groups. They forced us into building the habitat at such a far distance from the vent to avoid any damage to the vent community. I'm not a very green person myself, but I'm forced to agree with them. Vent communities are one of the few environments that haven't been destroyed by human so far. So, it should be protected.

Let me tell you more about this vent in specific. It's named the Edmond Vent System after a famous geochemist who was one of the first people to study vent systems. Great man, John Edmond. He taught me when I was at MIT. What was I saying? Oh, yes... this vent system is really fantastic. You simply cannot imagine the diversity of the life down there. People used to think that life does not exist in the deep ocean. And then, hydrothermal vents are discovered... and a totally new kind of life is found. Tubeworms, shrimps, crabs, mussels, all in numbers beyond our imaginations. And how do they feed... chemosynthesis! The sun may be the basis of life everywhere on Earth, but definitely not in hydrothermal vents! Marine biology will never be the same again. Even NASA is interested in the kinds of life in vent systems. If they're going to find some kind of life on Mars, although I have no idea why they want to do that, it would probably be of the same type as in the vents.