A vexing problem in studies of volcanism, and outgassing more generally, is that there is much that satellites cannot see, but it is terribly dangerous to get close enough to measure emissions of interest when things are most active—and usually very hot. Drones could vastly improve the completeness of monitoring of outgassing, affordably. DECADE, the Deep Earth Carbon Degassing project, is a collaboration within the Deep Carbon Observatory that uses new and established technologies to determine accurate global fluxes of volcanic CO2 to the atmosphere. So far DECADE has installed CO2 monitoring networks on 20 of the world’s 150 most actively degassing volcanoes. Funds from this grant support efforts by Emma Nicholson Liu to pioneer integration of drones into volcanic monitoring by experimenting with their use in monitoring a pair of previously uncharacterized emission sources in Papua, New Guinea. In addition to drone development, deployment, and analysis of data, the team plans two short movies for general audiences.  

Peter Fox leads a team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) that both conducts original deep carbon research and provides data management services to the scientists working in the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). Funds from this grant will allow Fox and his crew to continue to lead these data science efforts for the final 15 months of the DCO. To date, RPI researchers and tools have made possible breakthroughs by the DCO in, for example, understanding the “social life of minerals,” that is, co-occurrence of minerals, especially carbon-based ones. And RPI efforts have led to fast adoption by DCO researchers of the Jupyter notebook, the popular, web-based interactive computational platform. Going forward, grant funds will support RPI efforts to stimulate and visualize DCO discoveries, and to assure that data, models, publications, and other information are archived and accessible.

This grant provides operational and administrative support to the governing secretariat of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), headquartered at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which is charged with coordinating and synthesizing the work of DCO’s researchers, who number more than 1,300 and are spread across some 40 countries worldwide. Grant funds will offset operational costs of the international steering committee; provide support for the secretariat chairs, geoscientists Robert Hazen and Craig Manning; facilitate the DCO’s grand finale in Washington, D.C. in October 2019; and support several activities aimed at securing the legacies of the DCO at the conclusion of Foundation funding.

Funds from this grant provide 21 months of support for the continued operation of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Synthesis Group 2019 (SG 2019). Led by University of Cambridge geologist Marie Edmonds, SG 2019 is tasked with overseeing and managing the synthesis of the intellectual output of the DCO, bringing together into a coherent whole the diverse observations, insights, models, and datasets generated over the past 10 years by hundreds of DCO scientists across the globe. Funded activities include the writing of a decadal report summarizing the DCO’s scientific and technical accomplishments; the planning and execution of several culminating events in 2019; the production of infographics, videos, and educational materials based on DCO insights; and the production of several synthesis papers for publication in high-value journals like Nature and American Mineralogist. Grant funds will provide administrative and travel support to Edmonds, allowing her to work closely and effectively with DCO leadership in the United States and around the world.

The core work of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s engagement team, headquartered at the University of Rhode Island (URI), consists of community building and management. The team writes the DCO’s newsletter, maintains a contact database of DCO-affiliated scientists, produces the DCO bibliography, handles educational and outreach partnerships with entities such as National Geographic and the Smithsonian, updates articles about the DCO and deep carbon science in Wikipedia, and conducts all media relations. As the DCO moves toward its planned conclusion in 2019, the engagement team will have additional responsibilities associated with the synthesis of DCO research and the effective communication of its import to the wider scientific community and the public. This grant continues operational support for the DCO’s engagement team for 21 months.