It took IMAX director Stephen Low and his team nearly 10 years to create the new film Volcanoes Of The Deep Sea, which can be seen in less than an hour at the Ontario Science Centre this month. The film submerges the viewer 12,000 feet, about 3.6 kilometres, below the ocean’s surface, introducing a foreign world fuming with toxic gases and billowing with water as hot as 400oC.

But in this poisonous environment, dense communities of animals survive around undersea volcanoes, using energy not from sunlight, but from the Earth’s hot, internal core. These animals can survive nowhere else on earth but in small, isolated patches around these deep sea vents. The movie chronicles the exploration of this mysterious world, revealing many bizarre creatures, such as clams as big as dinner plates, six-foot tall tubeworms, and microbes that thrive in water hot enough to boil a lobster.

“The film allows you to see the bizarre organisms and the geology of the deep, far clearer than pilots and scientists have seen from a port hole,” said Dr. Richard Lutz, the science director for the film.

Lesley Lewis, CEO of the Ontario Science Center said: “This film takes you into the darkest depths of the ocean where only a select few have ever been. You may imagine this environment to be cold and lifeless. However, it contains hydrothermal vents and an ecosystem bursting with unusual creatures that challenge our ideas about the origin of life.”

Most scientists have assumed that life began in warm, shallow pools where radiation from the sun or lightning bolts from the sky could have sparked the creation of simple cells. But living around these deep sea vents are microorganisms that contain some of the most basic DNA structures of the human genome. These bacteria could be more closely related to the earliest life forms than any other kind of bacteria, which could indicate the birthplace of life on Earth to be deep in the sea.

Moreover, if life can flourish in toxic places like these deep sea vents, then perhaps life can exist in similar environments on other planets.

The film also documents the quest to find the origins of strange, hexagonal shapes that scientists have discovered on the ocean floor off the coast of Spain, the “crop circles of the deep.” Low commented: “But unlike crop circles, there aren’t any farmers running around making them at night.”