They eat foul chemicals poisonous to other creatures, thrive in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions and like nothing better than to bask in water superheated by molten rock. Meet the extremophiles, micro-organisms that inhabit lightless realms beneath the Earth’s ocean where, until the mid-’80s, we thought no life could exist.
A bold plan to wire 150,000 square miles of sea floor off the west coast of Canada and the United States could unlock secrets of this unusual life that flourishes where the seafloor twists and buckles, and which is part of a biosphere that may dwarf all life on land or in the sea.
Beyond their presence on Earth, scientists think similar deep dwellers may thrive inside other moons and planets. If we find life elsewhere in the universe, this is what it will look like, they say.
The search for otherworldly life, however, is only one impetus behind the $250 million effort called Project Neptune. Its lattice-work of instruments also could track migrating whales, assess stocks of endangered fish, lead to breakthroughs in understanding the Northwest’s difficult-to-predict weather, investigate deep-sea ecology and someday help predict earthquakes and tsunamis.
“In 20 years we’ll turn the seafloor into a ‘laboratory’ where we will routinely do work that isn’t imaginable today even in labs on land.”
John Delaney, UW oceanographer
“In 20 years we’ll turn the seafloor into a ‘laboratory’ where we will routinely do work that isn’t imaginable today even in labs on land,” says John Delaney (pictured at top), University of Washington oceanographer and leader of U.S. and Canadian institutions participating in Neptune.
Neptune scientists want to use 2,000 miles of electro-optical cable to wire the whole Juan de Fuca Plate. At 80,000 square miles, the Juan de Fuca Plate is significantly bigger than Washington state. The entire Neptune study area, including the continental shelf, will be about double that area. Up to 3,000 instruments, including video cameras, tiny subs and probes that could be operated by scientists back on land, would be stationed at 30 experimental sites along the cable network a mile or more under the ocean surface.
Currently the only similar U.S. research observatory in operation is a Rutgers University facility six miles off the Atlantic coast, in 50 feet of water with only two experimental sites about 100 yards apart.
Beyond its value to researchers, Delaney says the project should provide an “oceanarium” and a “scientific CNN” for the public. “Oceans are the most fascinating feature of our solar system,” Delaney says. “We want everyone with a home computer to have access to what we’re studying and eventually involve school children in our robotic operations, allowing them to experience firsthand the mysteries of the deep.
“My ultimate goal is to have science be as exciting as the Super Bowl.”
Delaney and other UW researchers, part of an oceanography program that’s recognized as among the top five in the nation, are working on Neptune with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Canada’s Institute for Pacific Ocean Science and Technology, and Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution.
Neptune will cost about $250 million; that’s $200 million to develop and install the network and $50 million for five years of operating funds. For the of price baseball player Alex Rodriguez’s contract, we could delve into the fundamental workings of our planet like never before, enjoying Mother Nature’s own very special effects.
Neptune is currently in its development phase. Its feasibility study was completed in 2000 with a half-million dollars from the National Oceanographic Partnership. Since then the National Science Foundation has provided more than $3 million toward communications, sensor and network development and, just last summer, the project received a key $5 million award from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles.
The Keck Foundation focuses primarily on medical research, science and engineering. For example, it provided $110 million to the University of Southern California’s School of Medicine for work focusing mainly on degenerative diseases of the brain, as well as backing the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Neptune can be likened to a telescope, Delaney says, one trained on “inner space.” The support of a premier philanthropic foundation such as Keck is especially important now, he says, and allows the development of new kinds of instruments and experiments relating earthquakes and volcanic activity across a tectonic plate to the resulting flush of activity by micro-organisms.
The surface of the Earth is made up of a dozen or so major tectonic plates. All are floating on the planet’s molten core that, slowly and constantly, moves the plates around. Among them are the Juan de Fuca Plate, west of us, and the North American Plate, on which the United States and Canada sit.
Where those two plates meet just miles off our coast, the Earth’s forces are shoving the edge of the Juan de Fuca under the North American Plate. It’s an area scientists call a subduction zone. A few hundred miles west, at the other side, the plate is pulling away from its seafloor neighbor at what’s called a spreading center. As the crust pulls away, molten lava oozes up into the open spaces, creating new seafloor.
“It’s in the pattern of small earthquakes around the Juan de Fuca Plate where we may find the secrets of where and when the big earthquakes take place.”
John Delaney, UW oceanographer
The pace of movement is usually only inches a year on both sides of the Juan de Fuca, but there can be more jolting movements. Hundreds of small earthquakes are detected around the plate each year, most of which go unfelt by those of us on land. When, instead of sliding smoothly under our continent, the Juan de Fuca and North American plates lock up, the resulting pressure can be released in large earthquakes. The February 2001 Nisqually Quake that struck Western Washington, although originating deep in the North American Plate, was not a subduction earthquake. An event in the 1700s was such a quake and reveals the potential power: It appears the Washington coastline dropped away as much as 6 feet in places and generated tsunamis that flooded coastal Japan.
“It’s in the pattern of small earthquakes around the Juan de Fuca Plate where we may find the secrets of where and when the big earthquakes take place,” Delaney says. While there are hundreds of seismometers on land across the region, there are few on the Juan de Fuca plate.
Last summer Neptune researchers from the United States and Canada sailed on the UW’s 276-foot research vessel to map the seismically active Nootka Fault. The fault runs across the Juan de Fuca Plate and, where it meets the North American Plate, is a prime site to study the subduction zone. A better understanding of subduction quakes could save lives around the world, says John Madden of Canada’s Institute for Pacific Ocean Science and Technology and vice chairman of the Neptune executive team. Madden is leading efforts to secure funding from his government for the portions of the network that will lie in Canadian waters.
As one plate slides under the other, tons of sediments are scraped and squeezed, expelling methane, hydrogen and fluids laden with deep-dwelling micro-organisms. These micro-organisms help supply food to clams, worms and other members of what are called “cold-seep communities.”
On the other side of the plate, the Endeavor Segment, a spreading center, is a showboat where volcanoes could erupt and hydrothermal vent structures form otherworldly landscapes.
The structures form after seawater circulates down into crevices and cracks in the seafloor, is heated by underlying magma chambers and becomes loaded with dissolved sulfur copper, iron, gold and silver. Eventually there is enough heat for the fluids to rise and vent back into the ocean, sometimes as forceful geysers hotter than 750 F. As the fluids mix with the much colder seawater, the minerals separate and solidify, piling up into impressive mounds, spires and chimney-like structures.
Brightly colored tubeworms, snails, scale worms, limpets and clams colonize these areas. Retrieved from the seafloor for study, such creatures can give off the stench of sulfur, like rotting eggs, because of the “diet” provided them by primitive bacteria.
In 1991, University of Washington scientists found the largest vent structure of this kind ever seen on the Endeavor Segment. At first they thought their instruments weren’t working. Several times they started measured from the base of the structure before believing the structure was 135 feet tall. That’s 15 stories worth of minerals precipitating from hot vent fluids and piling up. They named the thing Godzilla.
It was during a visit in 1996 that scientists found Godzilla, like its movie namesake, had been toppled. It’s one of the shortcomings of today’s approach to deep-sea research: When did the event happen? What triggered it? What happened in the days, weeks and months after that?
Alan Chave, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, expresses the frustration: “We’ve always operated in an expeditionary mode, which means we get on a ship and go out to some particular place and we stay for as long as a month. But we only get a snapshot view of what’s out there, we don’t get any information about how things change.
“To understand the system, you have to be there to see the change, and you can’t do that from a ship.” Pacific Northwest residents have only to think of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 to understand the difficulties: Just imagine what scientists would have missed if they had been unaware of changes in the mountain leading up to the explosion and eruption. What if they couldn’t get to the scene for four or five months and then had to collect most of their samples blindly from a mile above, not even being sure how massive the site of destruction was?
“You have to be there and have a presence,” Chave says of seafloor research. “That’s the driver behind Neptune.”
Neptune organizers envision a Juan de Fuca system in place by 2006. Before that, they hope to install a cable and experimental nodes for testing in Canadian waters and in Monterey Bay, home territory of Neptune partner Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
Researchers with the Monterey institute are leading efforts by the Neptune groups to extend the durability and cut costs of seismometers, and to develop instruments that can measure how micro-organisms respond to seismic activity and changes in vent fluids. Measuring micro-organisms in fluids are routinely done in labs on land, but never for long periods on the seafloor.
The concept of seafloor observatories was endorsed by a National Academy of Sciences panel that said in a report last year that “sea-floor observatories present a promising, and in some cases essential, new approach for advancing basic research in the oceans.”
The report was prepared after the National Science Foundation asked if such facilities were technically feasible and scientifically desirable. The NSF is currently funding $3.5 million of work related to communications and power for Neptune, with principal investigators on the respective work being Wood Hole’s Chave and UW’s Bruce Howe, an ocean engineer with the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Neptune would be a prime candidate if NSF secures funding for an Ocean Observatories Initiative, project organizers say.
The growth in funding for ocean research in recent years is encouraging to scientists, who point out that 60 percent of the earth’s surface is seafloor, the deep’s residents are among the most abundant life forms on the planet, and we’ve much to learn about that watery realm that drives everything from our climate to those exotic biological communities that exist without the benefit of the sun.
“We are becoming more and more dependent on the ocean,” Delaney says, “yet the seafloor and deep ocean remain some of the least understood parts of the planet.”
No longer do we assume life inhabits only a thin veneer at the Earth’s surface.
Today the micro-organisms inhabiting fluid-filled pores and cracks of rock throughout miles of the Earth’s crust are thought to comprise a population so large it rivals or exceeds all surface life. One estimate is that depositing all those micro-organisms evenly on land across the whole globe would result in a layer nearly 5 feet thick.
It may be this deep, hot biosphere is the next tropical jungle in terms of new drugs or industrial enzymes, says Oceanography Professor John Delaney.
Just think, for instance, of using micro-organisms that feast on toxic compounds to clean soils and sediments contaminated with PCBs, heavy metals and other pollutants.
Scientists in the mid-’90s determined that these microbes represent a third domain on the evolutionary “tree of life” along with bacteria found on the surface of the Earth on one branch and animals, plants and fungi on the other. Many believe they may have been Earth’s first inhabitants and, if volcanoes and oceans produce life here, why not on other planets or moons?
Among the possibilities is Europa, one of Jupiter’s 16 moons, which has a surface of cracked ice that appears to be flexing, perhaps because of an ocean below and a volcanic core like Earth’s.
“If and when we do a mission to Europa and we go through the ice, then we’re going to need to know how to study what’s below and search for life there,” says Pat Beauchamp, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Neptune’s lead overseeing project engineering. “Neptune gives us the chance to understand the types of technology that we’ll need to work there.”
“The bathysphere was lowered more than a half mile on a test run, unmanned. It came up heavy and, as it turned out, full of water under extremely high pressure. Deck hands began to unscrew a large brass bolt at the center of the door. Jets of water screamed out. Suddenly, with no warning, the bolt tore loose and shot across the deck like a shell from a gun. “
Bill Broad described in his book, The Universe Below, a test leading up to a June 1930 dive by William Beebe, the first scientist to view the deep using a sphere-shaped vehicle tethered to a ship above.
Ocean engineering has made many strides since, yet the challenges of working at the bottom of the ocean means that much work is still conducted from ships by lowering dredges and instruments into the depths. Submersibles, some that carry scientists and others that operate by remote control, are of limited use because they are expensive and can’t be launched in foul weather.
The challenges of engineering Neptune’s seafloor, robotic network—at a reasonable price—are many, according to Pat Beauchamp, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Neptune’s lead overseeing project engineering.
Having to rely on battery power for sensors has been the downfall of some previous attempts at long-term seafloor observations, Beauchamp says. Neptune will be powered via its cable network; however, the most likely power scheme, which works just fine on land, has never been tried on the seafloor anywhere.
Also, a system in the deep that’s meant to operate for 30 or 40 years must have a lot of built-in reliability and resilience to corrosion from salt water, fluctuating temperatures, occasional seafloor “storms” and disruptions from the very earthquakes scientists are so eager to study.
To be successful, Neptune will have to be a combination of the latest advances in computer science, telecommunications and robotics with evolving capabilities in the power and sensor industries. Beauchamp says successes could prove useful to other countries, such as Japan, where they are keen to install equipment as an early warning system for earthquakes and tsunamis. It could also benefit industries using power and communications lines on the seafloor.