Hydrothermal Vent Simulator (2D)

Vent Fluid

Vent temperature 350 °C

Mineral concentration 60%

Environment

Bottom current 30%

Cold seawater seeping into fractured crust, heating on contact with magma.

Live Readout

Chimney height

0.0 m

Plume temp @ mouth

350 °C

Mixing-front temp

2 °C

Growth rate

0.0 mm/yr·10³

How it works

Seawater percolates through cracks in the ocean crust, gets superheated by the magma chamber below (up to ~400 °C) and leaches metal sulfides (mostly iron and copper sulfides) out of the surrounding rock. When this acidic, metal-rich fluid jets back out into near-freezing (~2 °C) seawater, the sudden quench makes the dissolved sulfides instantly precipitate as fine black particles — the "smoke" of a black smoker.

Those particles settle around the vent mouth and cement together into a mineral chimney; hotter, more mineral-laden fluid precipitates faster and grows the chimney quicker, while a stronger bottom current bends the rising plume sideways and cools it faster. Right at the mixing front a steep, meters-wide temperature gradient — from over 350 °C in the vent throat to background deep-ocean temperature — creates a narrow habitable band where chemosynthetic bacteria and, in the Atlantic and Pacific, tube worms and other vent fauna can live off the chemical energy in the fluid instead of sunlight.

2°C~400°C