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.