Jack Corliss

As part of his doctoral work under Tjeerd van Andel, he analyzed samples of basaltic rock from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

In 1977, Corliss, Richard von Herzen, and Robert Ballard led a project using the DSV Alvin submersible to look for the presumed hydrothermal vents near the Galápagos Islands.

Corliss, Tjeerd van Andel,[1][2] and pilot Jack Donnelly were the crew of the Alvin to first discover the vents and the unexpected community of living creatures—giant tube worms, clams, shrimp, etc.—around them.

In 1981, he, John Baross, and Sarah Hoffman published a paper entitled "An Hypothesis Concerning the Relationship Between Submarine Hot Springs and the Origin of Life on Earth.

There he began using massively parallel computers (the Goodyear MPP and later MasPar MP-1) for cellular automata simulations of evolutionary systems.