This Island Might Help Us Understand The Origins of Life

Early in the morning on November 14th, 1963,  sailors on a fishing boat off Iceland's southern   coast were enjoying a cup of hot coffee when  they caught a whiff of something weird.

Sulfur. They couldn't figure out where  the smell was coming from.

The cook wasn't making eggs. The ship's motor wasn't malfunctioning.

And Magnus hadn’t eaten beans that night.

It wasn't until dawn broke when  they saw the source of the smell.

Off in the distance, an ominous column  of smoke billowed from the seasurface.

Turns out, it wasn't really smoke,  but a volcanic plume of ash and   gas—including sulfur—that emanated from  a volcano erupting on the seafloor.

It took less than a day for the puffs of sulfurous  smoke to rapidly grow 10 meters above the water,   creating the brand new island that the  Iceland Naming Committee called Surtsey.

While it didn’t look like much then, that island  has turned out to be a Godsend for scientists.

It has given them a rare opportunity to study   everything from how ecosystems evolve  on new land to the origins of life.

And they're still learning  new things about it today.

[♪ INTRO]

For starters, a volcanic eruption off the  coast of Iceland isn’t exactly shocking,   because the whole country sits along a  feature called the mid-Atlantic ridge.

This is where tectonic plates  pull apart from one another,   causing hot rocks to rush upward,  and sparking volcanic eruptions.

When hot lava meets water,  the results are explosive.