This is one of these hydrothermal vents.

It's how they find the hydrothermal vents.

And the hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment.

And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island.

This is what's called a hydrothermal vent.

They're exhaust vents of some type.

Go in through the air conditioning vents.

He's in the vents! He got the diamond!

We also found the deepest vents known yet 5,000 meters the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic where none had been found before.

The vents are emitting a black body radiation an IR signature and so they're able to find these vents at considerable distances.

And there's a whole new hydrothermal vent community that has been formed.

Now you've heard of hydrothermal vents, but the other discovery is that deep below the sea floor, there is vast reservoir of microbial activity, which we have only just discovered and we have almost no way to study.

It wasn't my fault, really. Sebulba flashed me with his vents.

I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them.

We're all choking, and there's smoke pouring through the vents, under the doors.

This is the target site, the world's deepest hydrothermal spring at Cenote Zacaton in northern Mexico.

And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations.

You might film this unbelievable hydrothermal vent, which you think at the time has to be on another planet.

Since this space is a waiting room for outpatients, we usually keep a lid over the vents.

This will allow heat and chemicals to escape through hydro thermal vents, providing more comfortable conditions for underwater life.

What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again.

So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.

And this kind of life and death of hydrothermal vent communities is going on every 30 or 40 years all along the ridge.

We find microbial life in every part of the planet in ice, in coal, in rocks, in volcanic vents it's an amazing thing.

And before the discovery of these vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis.

The red dot is the laser light of the submarine Alvin to give us an idea about how far away we are from the vents.

And that ephemeral nature of the hydrothermal vent community isn't really different from some of the areas that I've seen in 35 years of traveling around, making films.

So with Firefly, what we did is the problem is electronics get hot, and you have to put in vents or fans to keep them cool in most products.

So with Firefly, what we did is the problem is electronics get hot, and you have to put in vents or fans to keep them cool in most products.

Just two years ago working off Santorini, where people are sunning themselves on the beach, unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby, we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and more life systems.

In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on their shoulders.

So, we put the room service menus over the vents in the wall, we put blankets at the bottom of the door, we put the kids on the windowsill to try to get some air.

So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals they're basically aliens right here on Earth.

And taking them down so that they had access astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.

One for extracting oxygen out of the deep sea water, another one which houses this chemosynthetic bacteria, which takes the hydrothermal fluid that hot water that you saw coming out of the bottom and converts that into simple sugars that the tube worm can digest.

And much of this vast universe, much more may be habitable than we once thought, as we study extremophiles on Earth organisms that can live in conditions totally inhospitable for us, in the hot, high pressure thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, frozen in ice, in boiling battery acid, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors.