Funds from this grant continue support for Jesse H. Ausubel, Director of Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, in his role as the Sloan Foundation’s primary liaison to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO).  As Sloan’s representative at the DCO, Ausubel serves as a member of the DCO leadership, elicits grant proposals in support of the DCO’s four research communities, oversees progress and reporting on the Foundation’s approximately 30 active DCO grants, represents the Foundation’s policies, priorities, concerns, and aspirations to the DCO leadership, and prepares periodic reports to the Foundation on the DCO’s progress towards its decadal goals.  Grant funds provide primary salary and administrative support for Ausubel and his team’s activities through the anticipated completion of the DCO in 2019, where his work will focus on managing important late-stage DCO projects related to modeling and visualization, intellectual synthesis of DCO discoveries, dissemination of DCO results, and crafting stable institutional and intellectual legacies for the program after Foundation support ends in 2019.  

Though the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) was conceived as a 10-year effort, a midterm external review of the collaborative’s achievements suggested that the DCO leadership explore the possibilities for continuing the collaboration after Sloan Foundation funding lapses in 2019. This grant supports the creation of a special task force to explore such options. Led by French geologist Claud Jaupert, the task force will outline practical requirements and consequences of post?2019 options for the Deep Carbon Observatory, exploring the ways in which the DCO might be continued, expanded, or wound down. It will scan the intellectual horizon for new research ventures; outline international cooperative programs that could build on the DCO community and expand its scientific reach; identify researchers and academic institutions that might participate in post?2019 activities; and search for institutions, funding bodies, and foundations that could provide financial support for post?2019 activities. It would carry out these activities through commissioned papers, visits with key stakeholders and institutions, and a trio of workshops, including special focus on the (now) younger scientists who will be in the prime of their careers during the decade of the 2020s. The effort represents a reasoned, prudent way to evaluate what to do, if anything, with the databases, websites, instruments, models, monitoring networks, and human capital created by the DCO’s first decade of discovery.

Funds from this grant support an effort by Louise Kellogg of the University of California, Davis to lead a multidisciplinary group of Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) researchers in the development of the first stages of a Deep Carbon Earth Model that integrates existing geophysical knowledge with insights uncovered by the Deep Carbon Observatory. The project will involve representatives from each of the DCO’s four scientific communities—Reservoirs and Fluxes, Deep Energy, Deep Life, and Extreme Physics and Chemistry—as they come together to craft a series of interoperable modules that can be used to model the quantities, movements, origins, and forms of deep Earth carbon. Though a fully functional, predictive model is the ultimate goal, the project promises to provide several ancillary benefits to the larger DCO effort, including identifying gaps in existing knowledge, increasing communication between the DCO’s diverse communities, and establishing project-wide modeling protocols that can serve as the basis for both current and future modeling efforts.

The Extreme Physics and Chemistry (EPC) community of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is an international collaboration of geologists and geophysicists who have come together to transform our understanding of the unique physical and chemical properties of the 90 percent of Earth’s carbon estimated to reside in the planet’s high-pressure, high-temperature interior. EPC researchers study the diverse variety of forms deep carbon takes—solids, magmas, melts, low-density fluids—and examine the physical and chemical transformations carbon undergoes as it rises from the core to the surface and falls from the surface to the core. This grant provides two years of continued core support for the EPC as it moves toward completion of its ambitious research agenda.

The Deep Life community of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is an international collaboration of researchers who have come together to identify and quantify interactions between deep life and deep Earth carbon, to transform our understanding of the processes that define the diversity and distribution of deep life, and to determine the environmental limits of deep life. This grant provides two years of support to the Deep Life community as it continues its research agenda. Over the next two years the community plans to launch five major field expeditions; conduct genomic?based studies of the diversity and function of deep life; measure and estimate presently unknown quantities like the magnitude of deep Earth biomass and the number of deep Earth endospores; and explore the molecular basis of microbial adaptation to extreme deep subsurface conditions. In addition, Deep Life community scientists will contribute to a DCO-wide modeling and visualization initiative and strengthen the field through the coordination of workshops, community meetings, and fellowships.

This grant provides two years of continued support to the Deep Energy community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Researchers working in the Deep Energy community investigate the abiotic methane and hydrogen in the deep recesses of Earth. These compounds, when oxidized, release energy into the rocks around them, feed microbial life, and possibly contribute to humanity’s store of energy resources. Recent discoveries, many of them by DCO researchers, suggest that such deep energy reserves are significantly more plentiful than science has imagined. Over the next two years, Deep Energy researchers will use both field-based investigations in oceanic and continental settings and lab experiments on fluid-rock interactions to shed light on a number of important scientific questions, including how to differentiate between abiotic and biotic hydrocarbons; the role of serpentinization and other hydrogen-generating reactions in the production of deep energy; how deep energy reactions mediate the form, quantities, distribution, and mobility of abiotic carbon and hydrogen; and the relationship between deep energy and deep microbial life. In addition, the Deep Energy team will begin collaborative work with other DCO communities to bring together insights from numerous disciplines in geoscience to create a functional four-dimensional Deep Carbon in Earth Model.

Funds from this grant provide two years of continued support to the Reservoirs and Fluxes community of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). Questions about quantities and movements of deep carbon are fundamental to the DCO. How much carbon do the core, mantle, and deeper crust contain? Where is it? What mechanisms move carbon within and across Earth’s layers, and what are the rates of these movements? Deep carbon’s movements are also consequential for humanity, as when deep carbon erupts to the surface through volcanoes, or seeps out of the seafloor as hydrocarbons, or belches out when tectonic plates slip across one another, contributing to tsunamis. Now numbering more than 110 members, the Reservoirs and Fluxes community has matured into a set of networks addressing these and other questions, including mysteries of carbon’s most precious form, diamonds. Over the next two years, this international scientific network will focus on making important discoveries across five areas: the degassing of deep carbon through volcanoes; the degassing of deep carbon through tectonic and other diffuse processes; the origin, age, and depth of diamonds and the mineral inclusions within them; the fluid dynamics of carbon transport in volcanoes, and the global circulation of carbon between Earth’s surface and core; and the chemical forms, mineral hosts, and reactions of carbons moving between reservoirs. Supported activities include the establishment of the first global network for direct measurement of Cox flux, production of a database on eruptions and volcanic gases, the construction of an international reference collection of diamonds for research, and the development of new geodynamic models of deep carbon circulation.