Structure
Hydrothermal vents
Hot springs on the seafloor, first explored on the Galápagos Rift in the late 1970s, where whole communities run on chemical energy.
Chemosynthesis
Making food from chemical energy instead of light. At vents, bacteria inside tube worms oxidize hydrogen sulfide to feed their hosts.Source: NOAASource: Cavanaugh et al., 1981
Process
How Chemosynthesis connects
Chemosynthesis happens in
Chemosynthesis uses
Organism or group
Bacteria
Small single-celled organisms without a nucleus, found almost everywhere on Earth. Most bacteria in the human body are harmless, and some are helpful.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
Photosynthesis vs. Chemosynthesis (opens the original in a new tab)
NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. pmel.noaa.gov. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
ReferenceGovernment sourceEducationalProkaryotic cells in the hydrothermal vent tube worm Riftia pachyptila Jones: possible chemoautotrophic symbionts (opens the original in a new tab)
Cavanaugh CM, Gardiner SL, Jones ML, et al. (1981). Science 213:340-342.
Peer-reviewedPrimary research