Reconstruction of Ancient Seep Ecosystem

The discovery of hydrothermal vent ecosystem along the Galápagos Rift in 1977 has changed our view of life. Similar communities have been found around hydrocarbon seeps (cold seeps), sunken whale carcasses and sunken driftwood on sea floor. It turned out that these communities depend largely upon chemosynthetic bacteria, especially sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, for their food/energy source, and thus the communities have been called "chemosynthetic communities."

Since the discovery of chemosynthetic communities in modern oceans, numerous ancient chemosynthetic communities have been discovered/re-interpreted worldwide from geological records. In particularly, numerous ancient chemosynthetic communities from Cretaceous and younger sedimentary sequences have been found from Japanese Islands. It would be due to the Japanese archipelagoes have been situated (or even formed) along active plate margins.

One of our goal is to reveal evolution of seep communities and ecosystems over time. Since the Mesozoic is crucial ages to understand establishment of modern-type of chemosynthetic communities, our current main target ages is Mesozoic to Recent.