My seminar will be about sustainability, coastal resiliency, and past informing future. The Red Sea demarks the parting of the African and the Arabian tectonic plates. Termed a ‘maritime rift’, the Red Sea is unique on the modern Earth and an excellent analog to the opening of the Atlantic Ocean as the supercontinent Pangea broke up beginning about 200 million years ago. Examining the processes at play in the Red Sea sheds light on the mechanisms by which great oceans formed in the geological past. Interest in rifts is considerable – they represent a perfect natural laboratory in which to study plate movements and their related seismicity, and because the deep, narrow basins that they produce represent a rare biosphere, promoting exceptionally high levels of connectivity, diversity, and endemism. The coral reefs which inhabit the Red Sea, for instance, are remarkable in their diversity. They are also some of the most resilient reefs to climate change. The seminar will present findings from a series of missions facilitated by OceanX which have allowed the deep Red Sea to be mapped and sampled in unprecedented detail. Here, I will show how the Red Sea’s beauty is balanced by peril. The steep sides of the rift basin are fragile, seismically active, and submarine landslides can spawn tsunami as large as those of Earth’s most powerful earthquakes, at least locally. So narrow is the Red Sea, that tsunami have little time to dissipate prior to impacting the opposite coastline. Whereas the arid coastline of the Red Sea was sparsely inhabited in antiquity, it is now urbanizing rapidly, and there is compelling urgency to understand the natural hazards that accompany Earth’s only maritime rift basin.

The breakup of continents and the formation of new oceans by plate tectonics has been a fundamental process on Earth for at least 2.5 billion years and is intimately associated with magmatism and hydrothermal activity. A key (possibly the key) location to study all these processes is the Red Sea, as the Red Sea rift is the type-example of a mid-ocean ridge in a young ocean basin, permitting detailed access in space and time to the evidence of magmatic and hydrothermal processes occurring during and shortly after continental breakup. Another distinctive geological feature of the Red Sea is the presence of extensive evaporites resulting from closure and partial dry-up during Miocene times. Dissolution of evaporites led to the formation of brine pools in some of the deepest basins of the Red Sea Rift: the famous Red Sea Deeps. The unique Red Sea geology defines its history, morphology, and ocean physic, resulting in diverse ecosystems with a high rate of endemism. While the Red Sea's shallow coastal ecosystem, featuring remarkable coral reefs, is relatively well studied, and recognized, the deep Red Sea remains largely unexplored due to a combination of technical and logistic challenges of deep-sea research and the abundant presence of salt glaciers covering a large part of the active rift. Here, we present our last ten years of research on the deepest parts of the Red Sea along the active volcanic rift zone. Bathymetry, geophysical data, and rock chemistry are used to understand the geology of the Red Sea and the timing of continental breakup. With high-resolution AUV data, ROV observations, and sampling, we investigated volcanic processes and discovered for the first time active hydrothermal venting along the entire Red Sea rift. The unique environment of the Red Sea rift forms exceptional habitats that host flourishing microbial ecosystems and benthic fauna that we have only just start to discover and understand.