Pale towers rise from cracks in a dark seafloor. At the modern Lost City vents, the tallest reaches about 197 feet (60 meters), like a building with 20 floors. Water and rock built it.
If you could look inside a tower, you would find tiny pockets. Water seeping through rock brings hydrogen, a gas that can fuel chemistry. The vent water is alkaline, on the opposite side of the chemical scale from an acid. Where it meets seawater, minerals form thin walls.
Those pockets offer a way around a huge problem. In an open ocean, life's raw parts drift apart. Small rooms could keep them together. Different liquids on either side of a wall can also supply energy, like a battery.
Scientists have grown mineral chimneys in jars and wired them together to light a small lamp. Rock chemistry can make power. But no living cell grew out of that test.
Nobody knows where life began. Hot springs on land are another idea: pools that dry out can help join small parts into longer molecules. Lost City is a present-day clue, not a piece of the first ocean. Its towers keep growing in the dark.
