Funds from this grant support a field project that aims to separate and quantify the sources, pathways, and fates of carbon that originated as mantle rock or as sedimentary biomass. The location of the fieldwork is west of Costa Rica, where the seafloor sinks or “subducts” beneath the Caribbean plate. A team led by Peter Barry of the University of Oxford will look closely at this subduction zone to see to what extent the burial of microbes (organic material rich in carbon) on the slab during oceanic sedimentation is a one-way road to death. Prior research estimates that 85 percent of the subducted carbon sinks under the tremendous pressure of gravity and the overlying plate into the deep, lifeless mantle, but recent measurements have detected unusually high carbon dioxide degassing from the zone. This opens the possibility that quite a lot of “biotic” carbon in deep seafloor mud might recycle as surface life. The project is a continuation of ongoing work by Deep Carbon Observatory scientists to probe the limits to life and accurately characterize the outer bound of pressures and temperatures that are nonlethal to some environmental microorganisms.

This grant continues support to the Data Science Team of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), which provides data and computational infrastructure and services to the DCO membership. Led by Peter Fox at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Data Science Team provides key services to the DCO. Supported activities include the development and progressive improvement of deepcarbon.net, management of the DCO’s scholar database, and hosting an archive of all DCO plans, policies, publications by member scholars, and scientific data collected or generated by hundreds of individual DCO research projects. In addition, the team is responsible for the DCO’s data science efforts, working with the community to turn DCO data into a searchable corpus that can be agglomerated and analyzed to reveal new geoscientific insights. Finally, the Data Management team is a crucial player in the larger effort to synthesize a series of deep Earth carbon models from knowledge gained from the DCO’s decade of research. Grant funds will provide operational support for these core functions for two years.

This grant funds efforts by Robert Downs of the University of Arizona and Robert Hazen, cofounder of the Deep Carbon Observatory, to undertake a systematic application of evolutionary theories to carbon minerals. Downs and Hazen have argued persuasively that the lens of evolution fruitfully explains key aspects of diversification of mineral species, mineralization rates, and structural complexity through Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. Two-thirds of Earth’s mineral species are biologically mediated, inextricably linking the geosphere and biosphere in co-evolution. Grant funds support two interconnected activities. First, Downs and Hazen will develop and exploit data resources, statistical modeling, and visualization tools to understand quantitatively Earth’s changing carbon mineralogy from crust to mantle. Second, they will expand and explore the Deep-Time Data Infrastructure, which combines mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, and proteomics resources. Planned outputs include an open-access carbon mineral data base with more than 10,000 data sets for carbon-bearing minerals that include age, locality, and depth.

The state of deep carbon modeling today resembles that of climate modeling 40 years ago, when models of the atmosphere, oceans, sea ice and glaciers, forests, and land surface were all partially developed but were not integrated. In today’s geoscience, models exist of the workings of the Earth’s core, the lower and upper mantle, the crust, and of particular processes such as volcanism and plate tectonics, but no system or framework embraces all of these, especially across time scales ranging from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. Funds from this grant support efforts to integrate two popular models: MELTS, Mark Ghiorso’s model of the thermodynamic properties of magmas, and DEW, a model developed by Dmietri Sverjensky that simulates the behavior of water and water-dissolved carbon in the deep Earth. Funds will support the development of an integrated model that will be open source, freely available, released to the scientific community, and suitable for integration into the larger Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) system of models. Also funded is a workshop that will introduce the new model to the DCO community. Development of comprehensive numerical simulations of the origins, movements, and forms of deep carbon has emerged over the past three years as a major, integrative goal of the Deep Carbon Observatory. The proposed integration of melts and fluid models, if successful, represents significant progress toward to achieving that goal.

This grant supports the continued operation of the Secretariat of the Deep Carbon Observatory DCO). The Secretariat performs a series of invaluable coordinating and steering functions for the Deep Carbon Observatory as a whole, including conducting program management and oversight; organizing the DCO International Science Meeting and other scientific meetings; coordinating all components of the DCO to amplify its impact;  assisting with research synthesis, integration, and long?term planning; expanding and strengthening the DCO partnerships and intra-community interactions; promoting program development and leveraging of DCO resources;  facilitating further development of DCO-supported instruments and promoting their broad community use; engaging early-career scientists in the DCO; and reducing enterprise risks. Grant funds will support these and other activities of the secretariat as the DCO moves toward completion in 2019.

The year 2019 will mark the culmination of 10 years of scientific discovery by more than 800 scientists from 40 nations who form the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). New discoveries are emerging about deep life, about the diversity of ways that oils and gases form, about mineral evolution, and about the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere. This grant supports the creation of a Synthesis Group within the DCO, led by Dr. Marie Edmonds of the University of Cambridge, U.K., which will take responsibility for ensuring that the project delivers on its commitments and that the whole of the project promises to be more than the sum of its parts. Edmonds and her team plan to explore several different possibilities for intellectual synthesis of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s work. Possibilities include a dynamic model of deep carbon in Earth, a diamond-themed synthesis that uses the popular gemstone to tell us as much as possible about deep carbon, a place-based synthesis that uses geographic or geological location to tell as much as possible about deep carbon, a mineral evolution synthesis, and an “Earth in five reactions” synthesis that tells the story of deep carbon through major chemical processes like serpentinization. Over the next two years, grant funds will allow Edmonds and her team to explore and prioritize these different approaches to synthesis as well as develop synthesis-related projects for potential future support.

Funds from this grant continue support for the Engagement Team of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), which provides internal and external communications services to the international community of DCO geoscientists. Led by Sara Hickox at the University of Rhode Island, the Engagement Team provides content for the Deep Carbon Observatory website, publishes a newsletter and blog, compiles an up-to-date bibliography of DCO publications, maintains a contact database on the approximately 800 DCO researchers, oversees network-wide events, spearheads public engagement efforts, provides graphic design services for DCO researchers, and works to ensure smooth intra-DCO communication of goals, priorities, and achievements. Grant funds support the continuation of these activities for an additional two years. In addition, Hickox and the Engagement Team will provide support to the newly created Synthesis Group of the DCO, which focuses on synthesizing the diverse research accomplishments of DCO researchers in anticipation of the project’s contemplated end in 2019.