Did Life Begin In Geothermal Vents?

Science Daily is reporting on a new paper in BioEssays that claims to overturn the long held understanding that life probably arose in the oceans of the early earth through processes mediated by ultraviolet sunlight. Proposed by J.B.S. Haldane, this idea has been used as a conceptual framework for modeling abiogenic processes for over 80 years. However, senior author William Martin from the Institute of Botany III in Düsseldorf is unimpressed with the model, and is proposing that instead life arose in geothermal vents at the bottom of the early oceans, and was powered through energy provided by the earth's core:

Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life, but soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life.

Unfortunately I don't currently have access to the paper itself, so I'm just going by this description. I know better than most people how science journalism can fail at communicating the nuanced complexity of scientific concepts after reducing them to mere sound bytes, but Science Daily generally does a respectable job of it. BioEssays has a mid-level impact factor around 5.3, but the fact that this research isn't in being presented in Science or Nature tells me that it's highly speculative and probably incomplete. Notwithstanding, it is an interesting idea. Team leader Nick Lane from University College London provides a nice description of the general concept:

We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H₂, CO₂, N₂, and H₂S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent -- one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores.

I'm not ready to completely throw out my textbooks, but this is sure to become a progressive (and contentious) area of research as more evidence accumulates supporting or refuting this compelling hypothesis.

UPDATE: It seems this article will be coming in next month's issue:

How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the origin of life
Martin, William; Lane, Nick; Allen, John F