You might know what a hydrothermal vent looks like: black plumes billowing from deep-sea pillars encrusted with tube worms, hairy crabs, pouting fish. But do you know what it sounds like?
To the untrained ear, a hydrothermal vent — or more precisely, one vent from the Suiyo Seamount southeast of Japan — generates a viscous, muffled burbling that recalls an ominous pool of magma or a simmering pot of soup.
To the trained ear, the Suiyo vent sounds like many things. When asked during a Zoom call to describe the Suiyo recording more scientifically, Tzu-Hao Lin, a research fellow at the Biodiversity Research Center at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, took a long pause, shrugged and laughed. People always ask him this, but he never has the answer they want to hear.