"Yet, as it will, life returned to this site of complete devastation... The world those fossils described, the one that flourished on the order of 20 million years ago, during the early Miocene epoch, was strikingly different from today's Arctic... Devon Island was covered with a forest of birch trees and conifers, a landscape that one now finds about 2,000 miles to the south, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Maine. Now-extinct forms of rhinoceros and mouse deer browsed among the trees; shrews and pika-like relatives of modern rabbits darted through the shadows; and freshwater fish swam the lakes and streams... "
Global warming - good for biodiversity! ;)
;') Of course, the problem with the scenario (including these thermal vents) isn't the heat, but the food supply. Unless there is sufficient sunlight, the basis for the food chain -- plants -- won't grow. Mice and rabbits don't eat fish. (':