<p class="ingestion featured-caption">Researchers examining cores drilled from deep beneath the ocean.IODP JRSO</p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists drilled into the seafloor to look billions of years into the planet's past.</li><li>Some scientists think <a target="_blank" class href="https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-follow-crabs-ocean-floor-discover-deep-sea-hot-springs-2023-11">hydrothermal vents</a> may have given rise to life on Earth.</li></ul><p>A group of scientists are looking for clues about the <a target="_blank" class href="https://www.businessinsider.com/life-origin-abiogenesis-warm-pools-darwin-2017-10">origin of life</a> in a massive chunk of rocks they pulled up from deep below the seafloor.</p><p>In the pitch-black waters at the bottom of the Atlantic is a vast array of hydrothermal vents and hot springs that, some scientists <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/early-life-earth-theories">hypothesize,</a> offer a similar environment to where life may have blossomed on Earth billions of years ago.</p><p>The region is called the Lost City, and it has been a hot spot of scientific interest for decades.</p><p>But there was one area of the Lost City that researchers couldn't access until recently: the deep sub-seafloor rock that supports the city. Hidden within that rock could be organic molecules that hold clues to how life began.</p><p>"It sounds crazy to say that, but it's not wrong," Susan Q Lang, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, told Business Insider.</p><p>Lang co-led a team last year that <a target="_blank" class href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mining-companies-extracting-resources-from-hydrothermal-vents-2015-10">drilled deeper into that seabed</a> than ever before and obtained a sample that's over 4,000 feet long. Here's how they achieved such a feat and what they've found in those rock samples, so far.</p>