The Mussels That Eat Oil
With help from bacteria, these shellfish can thrive on volcanoes made of asphalt.
In 2004, a team of geologists while exploring the Gulf of Mexico. They were searching for sites where oil and gas seep out of the ocean floor, but instead, two miles below the ocean’s surface, they found a field of dormant black volcanoes. And unlike typical volcanoes that spew out molten rock, these had once belched asphalt. They looked like they had been fashioned from the same stuff used to pave highways, because that’s exactly what they were. The team named one of them Chapapote
