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Project Progress

The permeable rocks of the upper oceanic basement contain seawater-sourced fluids estimated to be ~2% of the global ocean volume. This represents a very large potential subsurface biosphere supported by chemosynthesis. Recent collection of high integrity samples of basement fluid from the sedimented young basaltic basement on the Juan de Fuca Ridge flanks, off the coasts of Vancouver Island (Canada) and Washington (USA), and subsequent chemical analyses permit numerical modeling of metabolic redox reaction energetics. The values of Gibbs free energy for potential chemolithotrophic net reactions were calculated in basement fluid and in zones where basement fluid and entrained seawater may mix. In pure basement fluid, energy yields from the anaerobic respiration processes investigated are anemic, releasing <0.3 J/kg basement fluid for all reactions except methane oxidation by ferric iron, which releases ~0.6 J/kg basement fluid. In mixed solutions, aerobic oxidation of hydrogen, methane, and sulfide are the most exergonic on a per mole electrons basis. Per kg of basement fluid, the aerobic oxidation of ammonia is by far the most exergonic at low temperature and high seawater: basement fluid ratio, decreasing by more than two orders of magnitude at the highest temperature (63°C) and lowest seawater: basement fluid ratio investigated. Compared with mixing zones in deep-sea hydrothermal systems, oceanic basement aquifers appear to be very low energy systems, but because of their expanse, may support what has been labeled the ‘starving majority’.

Project members participated in an expedition to the eastern Juan de Fuca Ridge flank (R/V Atlantis AT26-03, with ROV Jason; 12-26 July 2013). Cowen, Lin, Hsieh, Rappé, Steward, Jungbluth, Nigro, Omori and Bowers prepared and packed the shipboard and sampling gear. All team members except Cowen, Lin and Rappé represented Cowen and UHNAI to sail on the expedition. This expedition employed remotely-operate-vehicle (ROV) Jason in order to (1) recover an autonomous pumping and sampling system, GeoMICROBE sled (Figure 1), which was deployed on the seafloor in July 2011; (2) collect large volume basement fluids using a novel mobile pumping system (MPS, Figure 2); and (3) filter large volume basement fluids in situ using a modified GeoMICROBE sled (MGM, Figure 1). Deep crustal fluids were pumped from several hundreds of meters below the seafloor and collected onto filters or within acid-washed and sterile samplers at the seafloor.

The recovered GeoMICROBE sled faithfully filtered and collected high integrity basement fluids at a monthly-resolution, as preprogramed. The resulting filters are currently being processed in order to look for colloidal tracers (fluorescence microspheres) that simulate microorganisms and were injected during a large-scale, long-term and cross-hole experiment initiated in October 2010. This will provide unprecedented insight into the dispersal properties of this remote biosphere. With the MPS, several large-volume (up to 600L) and high-integrity basement fluids were also retrieved. Multiple deployments of MGM also allowed us to filter basement fluids on the seafloor with minimum submersible time, resulting in up to 5,500 L of basement fluid filtered through a single cartridge (Figure 3). Due to low concentrations of biomass and viruses, these large volume samples facilitate a breadth of research not otherwise possible with small volume samples. These samples are now being analyzed for a suite of geochemical, microbiological (e.g. biomass, genomics, transcriptomics, metabolic characteristics) and virological (e.g. virus concentration, molecular diversity, viral activities) parameters. Metabolic experiments are planned in order to obtain the potential metabolic rates of basement microorganisms. In addition, a large amount of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) was collected for the characterization of its composition so that we can begin to understand the reactivity of the organic carbon pool.