Ship brings rocky clues to life’s origins up from ocean’s ‘Lost City’

Researchers have long argued that regions deep in the Earth's oceans may harbor sites from which all terrestrial life sprung. In the Atlantic, they gave the name "Lost City" to a jagged landscape of eerie spires under which they proposed that the life-preceding chemistry may have churned.

And now for the first time, specialists have succeeded in getting a glimpse of this potential Garden of Eden.

A report in the journal Science on Thursday tells of a 30-person team drilling deep into a region of the mid-Atlantic seabed and pulling up nearly a mile of extremely rare rocky material. Never before has a sample so massive and from such a great depth come to light. The material is central to a major theory on the origin of life.

"We did it," said Frieder Klein, an expedition team member at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. "We now...