{"id":60878,"date":"2013-03-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/deep-carbon-observatory-seeks-to-discover-secrets-of-carbon-inside-earth\/"},"modified":"2013-03-11T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T00:00:00","slug":"deep-carbon-observatory-seeks-to-discover-secrets-of-carbon-inside-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2013\/03\/deep-carbon-observatory-seeks-to-discover-secrets-of-carbon-inside-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Carbon Observatory seeks to discover secrets of carbon inside Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t溏心vlog免费B站 faculty among international team of scientists<\/p>\n


\nNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 March 11, 2013 — The Deep Carbon Observatory, a decade-long $500 million research project to discover the quantity, movement, origin, and forms of carbon deep inside the Earth, has released a landmark 700-page book, Carbon in Earth, which outlines questions that will guide the program through 2019 and beyond.<\/p>\n


\nThe research program, which includes 溏心vlog免费B站 scientists Steven D\u2019Hondt, Katherine Kelley and Dawn Cardace, is investigating the movement of deep carbon in the slow convection of the mantle, the percolating fluids of the crust, and the violent emissions from volcanoes. It is searching for the ancient origin of deep carbon and the formation and transformation of its many forms, ranging from gas and oil to diamonds and deep microbes.<\/p>\n


\nThe Deep Carbon Observatory is also making a significant commitment to an international engagement and communications effort, led by Sara Hickox and Sunshine Menezes at 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Office of Marine Programs and funded through a grant to the Graduate School of Oceanography from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. <\/p>\n


\nThe new book, details of the Observatory program, and a new website (www.deepcarbon.net) were announced on March 4 at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. <\/p>\n


\nNinety percent or more of Earth\u2019s carbon is thought to be locked away or in motion deep underground\u2014a hidden dimension of the planet as poorly understood as it is profoundly important to life on the surface, according to scientists.<\/p>\n


\nD\u2019Hondt, a 溏心vlog免费B站 professor of oceanography, co-authored a chapter in the new book and is a member of the Observatory\u2019s Deep Life Directorate, which is discovering and describing the microbes and viruses that live in the deep ocean and beneath the ocean floor and how they interact with deep carbon cycles.<\/p>\n


\nThe variety of bacterial life at extreme high-pressure depths worldwide constitutes a subterranean \u201cGalapagos,\u201d he said, adding that such subsurface life comprises a large portion of Earth\u2019s total biomass. DNA has unearthed a marvel of diversity among deep single-celled microorganisms. And deep fungi, organisms with complex cell structures in the marine subsurface, have been a scientific surprise.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cGiven the extraordinarily low rates of respiration, subsurface microbes must reproduce very slowly, if at all,\u201d said D\u2019Hondt. \u201cThey take at least hundreds to thousands of years to reproduce and it’s conceivable that they live without dividing for millions to tens of millions of years.\u201d Still to be determined, he noted, is the extent to which these organisms are \u201cmicrobial zombies, incapable of being revived to a normal state.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nCardace is also working with the Deep Life Directorate. She has established a series of serpentinite groundwater monitoring wells in northern California that enable her to characterize the rock, water, gases, and microbiological communities and monitor any changes taking place.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cIn many ways, Earth’s deep subsurface habitats are similar to those of the early Earth when the first cells were assembled,\u201d said Cardace, assistant professor of geosciences. \u201cStudying modern life in blocks of Earth’s mantle can inform our understanding of how life arose.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nKelley is a member of the Observatory\u2019s Reservoirs and Fluxes Directorate and is investigating the dissolved carbon dioxide in the lavas that form the Earth\u2019s crust at mid-ocean ridges. An associate professor of oceanography, her project aims to figure out how much carbon is held in the Earth’s mantle, beneath the oceanic crust, and assess how much escapes to the oceans and atmosphere during submarine volcanic processes at these ridges.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cWe are measuring the dissolved CO2 contents of rapidly-quenched natural volcanic glasses from global mid-ocean ridges, with the ultimate goal of making these measurements on the complete collection of more than 10,000 submarine glass samples in the Smithsonian collection,\u201d she said. \u201cBut CO2 is actually very insoluble in liquid magma, so it is usually partially lost to degassing very deep in the crust, long before volcanoes erupt at the sea floor. We are hoping to find examples of lavas that have not degassed their CO2, but such samples are rare.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nThe Deep Carbon Observatory is expected to create a profound new understanding of this planet and others, shedding unprecedented light on Earth\u2019s highly active subterranean environment, the globe\u2019s oldest ecosystem. It hopes to answer such questions as: How much carbon is stored inside Earth, what are the reservoirs of that carbon, how does carbon move among reservoirs, how much rising carbon is recycled from the surface, and did deep organic chemistry play a role in life\u2019s origins?<\/p>\n


\n\u201cOf the 88 naturally occurring, long-lived elements on Earth, carbon stands alone,\u201d said Robert Hazen, executive director of the Observatory. \u201cNo other element contributes so centrally to the well-being and sustainability of life on Earth, including our human species.\u201d<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

溏心vlog免费B站 faculty among international team of scientists NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 March 11, 2013 — The Deep Carbon Observatory, a decade-long $500 million research project to discover the quantity, movement, origin, and forms of carbon deep inside the Earth, has released a landmark 700-page book, Carbon in Earth, which outlines questions that will guide the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}