Funds from this grant support the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in its efforts to provide data science support to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). The RPI team will establish a Deep Carbon Virtual Observatory for community data holdings; provide robust data infrastructure for DCO instrumentation, secretariat, and engagement activities; enable scientific discovery via visualization and analysis; and advance educational aspects of data science among all DCO participants. Planned tasks range from creating tools to capture streams of data from sensors to storing simulation results to creating a DCO-wide bibliographic infrastructure. To maximize the value of the funded activities, the RPI team will look beyond the specific needs of DCO researchers to the larger scientific community and will work closely with the U.S. Geological Survey, National Science Foundation, and counterpart agencies around the world to guide global earth science data infrastructure developments.

Diamonds are the dense quintessence of carbon. Carried near the surface in eruptions of rock from the mantle from below 100 km, diamonds are scientifically significant because they prove the existence of Earth's deep carbon. They also matter because the bubbles or inclusions in them hold precious evidence about Earth at depths that are otherwise inaccessible. This grant funds an initiative led by Steven Shirey of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington to form an international group of diamond researchers that aspires to take diamond research in new directions beyond the traditional bounds of geology, physics, and chemistry. Tapping a group of more than 30 researchers from a dozen nations, the consortium aims to forge a new understanding of the conditions of diamond formation in the deep mantle, how carbon is transported and stored in the mantle now and in the past, and whether a significant reservoir of mantle carbon is primordial or recycled. Grant funds will support the development of consortium organizational infrastructure; the assembly of an internationally accessible diamond reference collection for collaborative research; outreach activities to potential partners in government, academia, and industry; and the creation of information sharing technologies to facilitate cooperation between members. The consortium has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of diamonds and the role they play in the deep mantle and to augment and inform the scientific agenda of the Deep Carbon Observatory.

By the time it culminates in 2020, the Foundation expects that the Deep Carbon Observatory will involve nearly 1,000 researchers from scores of research and educational institutions, across dozens of countries, spanning a tremendous number of scientific disciplines, including geology, physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and microbiology. Creating and maintaining a coherent, consistent identity for such a distributed, heterogeneous group and facilitating communications within it is crucial if the DCO is to achieve its goals quickly and efficiently. Funds from this grant support efforts by a team led by Sara Hickox at the University of Rhode Island to manage community-building, communication, education, and outreach activities for the DCO. Informed by experience managing education and outreach for the Census of Marine Life, Hickox and her team will facilitate interaction, knowledge-sharing, and coordination among DCO researchers; communicate common goals, methods, plans, and research agendas; produce educational materials; and coordinate the dissemination of DCO research to media outlets and the public.

This grant provides two years of core operating support to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), headquartered at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Funds will support the continued operation and activities of the DCO's governing secretariat and international steering committee, which is responsible for coordinating and synthesizing the individual initiatives pursued by the DCO's four scientific directorates. Though this grant, the Secretariat will pursue a diverse array of important goals, including further development of the organizational infrastructure of the DCO, strengthening the network of collaborating DCO institutions, overseeing the production of a "baseline report" that quantifies the current state of knowledge of deep earth carbon, managing a "launch" of the project aimed at major media and the public, securing matching gifts and other sources of funding for DCO activities, and developing a detailed vision for the final six years of the project.

The cooperative, international Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) aims to examine the forms, volumes, and movements of carbon deep in the Earth at an unprecedented scale as well as in unprecedented detail. Success within this decade requires not only new samples, but also new ways of sampling and instruments variously more sensitive, smaller, larger, more robust, and less susceptible to contamination. This grant to the Deep Carbon Observatory headquarters at the Carnegie Institution of Washington provides funds to help develop four pioneering instruments and to conduct three "sandpit" exercises to spur development of several more. "Sandpit" is a term popularized in recent years to describe team?oriented workshops with a specific, collective problem?solving goal and some funds to follow through. The four proposed instruments are the following: a combined instrument for molecular imaging in geochemistry to measure trace amounts of carbon in lower mantle or core mineral phases and transform our estimates of the global carbon budget; a quantum cascade laser-infrared absorption spectrometer for clumped methane isotope thermometry to explore methane formation temperatures; a large-volume diamond anvil cell to explore material properties at very high pressure that have been examined before only in tiny volumes; and an ultrafast laser spectrometer to assess thermodynamic properties, reaction mechanisms, and kinetics of carbon processes at conditions of deep pressure and high temperature. The three sandpit exercises would address high-pressure, high-temperature bioreactors; use of remote sensing (for example, to measure outgassing from volcanoes); and computational resources and software.

Established in June 2009, the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) aims to address two fundamental issues: the origins, abundance, and distribution of hydrocarbons (including so-called fossil fuels) and the origins of life, for which carbon is the key element. The DCO has organized itself into four "directorates", each tasked with executing a different element of the DCO's ambitious research agenda. In October 2010, the Foundation supported the launch of the DCO's first directorate, on deep life. Funds from this two-year grant will provide support for the continuation and expansion of this directorate's research agenda. The overarching theme of the Deep Life Directorate is understanding microbial transformations in rock-hosted deep subsurface habitats. Over the next two years, researchers organized by the directorate plan to survey the extent and diversity of subsurface microbial communities, catalogue microbial activities relative to their environmental context, and identify relationships between deep subsurface microbial processes and carbon fluxes. Several innovative approaches are planned. For example, Deep Life researchers will lower incubation chambers filled with pre-characterized mineral substrates into boreholes and fracture systems and then observe and measure what ensues. In surface labs, researchers will examine cells that tolerate temperatures above 100 degrees centigrade and pressures approaching 20,000 atmospheres.