You may have heard of Sharknado, a science fiction movie about a freak hurricane that flings out deadly sharks in its powerful winds (yes, that was a real movie.)
Now, get ready for… sharks swimming in active volcanoes! I call it: Sharkano.
While Sharkano may be an unanticipated summer blockbuster, it still sounds like a bad science fiction movie, right? Well, amazingly, there is nothing fictional about this.
There are real sharks living alive and well in volcanoes – and we have the video footage to prove it, thanks to National Geographic.
Brennan Phillips, an ocean engineer from National Geographic, led a team to a volcano in the Solomon Islands located in the Southwest Pacific Ocean. The goal of Brennan’s venture was to find any hydrothermal activity near the volcano.
The main peak of the volcano is called Kavachi. Kavachi’s summit is 66 feet below the surface, and it’s also still very active.
Kavachi’s first recorded eruption took place in 1939. It’s most recent eruption occurred in January 2014. Active volcanoes are unpredictable – who knows when Kavachi will erupt next.
Luckily for Brennan and his team, Kavachi wasn’t erupting during the time of their expedition, nor did it give any signs that it was about to. With that in mind, they proceeded to drop an 80-pound deep-sea camera into Kavachi’s crater, where it landed at 147 feet.
The camera journeyed underwater for about one hour before the team recovered it. Upon reviewing the footage, they saw something shocking.
Inside Kavachi’s active crater, three underwater species – the sixgill stingray, the scalloped hammerhead shark, and the silky shark – lived seemingly unaffected by the volcano’s searing temperatures and intense acidity.
“When it’s erupting, there’s no way anything could live in there,” Brennan says in the video below.
And like we noted earlier, active volcanoes can erupt at any moment.
Now that is literally living every moment like it’s your last.
The footage, though fascinating, brings more questions than answers. How do these species survive? How are they unaffected by the acidic and hostile environment of a volcano?
Brennan himself wonders aloud about the species’ survival if the volcano erupts: “Do they leave? Do they have some sort of sign that it’s about to erupt? Do they blow up sky-high in little bits?”
A few YouTube users provided some answers to these questions.
Regardless, this video is a testament to the adaptability of nature and the many mysterious surrounding the depths of our oceans.
How exciting!
Please SHARE this stunning video with your friends and family.
