A human-occupied vehicle (HOV) probing the deep Pacific Ocean has cast a light upon a massive undersea 'metropolis'.

The tortuous system of deep craters and dolomite walls blows the Atlantic Ocean's famous 'Lost City' out of the water.

Through a curtain of falling marine 'snow', the ghostly carbonate walls and jagged rocks around twenty hydrothermal vents shimmer in the heat – almost as if they were a deep-sea mirage.

At 11.1 square kilometers (4.3 square miles), the newly discovered hydrothermal field is over a hundred times larger than its Atlantic counterpart.

The Lost City, with its jagged landscape of towers and turrets, was discovered near the mid-Atlantic ridge in 2000, and it was once the largest field of hydrothermal vents known anywhere in the world.

Related: 'Lost City' D

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