When she arrived, she saw the action on the seafloor being broadcast on a large bank of monitors, and she spotted a handful of individual krill spread out on a hydrothermal vent, a fissure in the ocean crust where hot magma and seawater meet and create a mineral-rich environment that attracts a host of organisms. For Bernard, a professor of biological oceanography at Oregon State University, finding krill here represented a momentous discovery. “I kind of lost my mind,” she recalled. It was the first time the animal had been observed on a vent.