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In a paper issued on Wednesday, marine seismologists looking at a site in the East Pacific say they have gained insights into how this unique plumbing system of hydrothermal vents works.

The jets are found thousands of metres below the surface on the mid-ocean ridges - geologically active "mountain ranges" - formed from mighty tectonic plates that push into each other and form spines along the ocean floor.

Until now, the main hypothesis about hydrothermal vents has been that gigantic pressure forces seawater through large faults along the flanks of the ridge.

The water, the theory goes, is then heated by coming into proximity with volcanic rock before re-emerging at the middle of the ridges, where the vents are usually clustered.

But in the first detailed investigation into vent circulation, a team led by Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University's Earth Observatory in New York has come up with a different picture.

They placed seismometers over a four-square-kilometre area of the East Pacific Rise, about 800km south-west of Acapulco, that has been under study for the past 15 years.