.dropcap { color: #838078; float: left; font-size: 82px; line-height: 60px; padding: 5px 8px 0 0; } The bird was olive-green and yellow with a chunky beak. No one knew where she came from. But she probably wasn’t supposed to be here. She just appeared one day, tattered and listless. She must have been flying quite some time before she found us. On our steel island, songbirds didn’t drop from the sky every day. For weeks the R/V Atlantis had been stationed on the open sea some 40 miles from shore. Erik Cordes, an ecologist at Temple University, was leading a team of scientists from about half a dozen labs on a mission to explore life along the continental margin in the Pacific Ocean. There, just west of Costa Rica and hundreds to thousands of feet below the water’s surface, underwater mountains are liquid rainforests. In nearby areas, Earth’s crust has cracked open, and methane and other gasses seep out in the pressurized depths. These seeps are oases...