Christopher Ballentine, Co-Chair
Deep Energy Directorate Deep Carbon Observatory
The Deep Carbon Observatory: Transformational Scientific Opportunities Roadmap for Solid Earth Sciences in Europe Paris, France October 2012
The primary mission of the Deep Carbon Observatory is to promote a transformational understanding of the physical, chemical and biological roles of carbon in Earth’s interior.
It is an international, interdisciplinary, decade-long initiative dedicated to improving our knowledge of the deep carbon cycle and achieving a fundamental understanding of Earth through carbon.
Mission
• A 10-year project launched in Sept. 2009 with funding from the A. P. Sloan Foundation following an exploratory study involving 300 researchers
• Foster international cooperation in addressing global-scale questions.
• Engage more than 1,000 researchers from 50 countries, with major new funding for deep carbon research from international governmental, corporate and private sources
• Example of proposed scope: Census of Marine Life www.coml.org ($650 M total; $70 M Sloan support)
Deep Carbon: Science Challenges
• How much carbon is stored in Earth’s deep interior?
• What are the reservoirs of that carbon?
• How does carbon move among reservoirs?
• Is there a significant carbon flux between Earth’s deep interior and the surface?
• What is the nature and extent of deep microbial life?
• Did deep biochemistry play a role in life’s origins?
• Is there a deep source of hydrocarbons?
We need fundamental advances to understand Earth’s deep carbon
DCO Directorates
• Deep Life
• Reservoirs & Fluxes
• Deep Energy
• Extreme Physics &
Chemistry
Decadal Goals
a. Inventory possible C-bearing minerals in the mantle and core. b. Characterize the physical and thermochemical properties of
those phases at relevant P-T conditions. c. Develop environmental chambers to access C-bearing
samples in new regimes of P-T under controlled conditions (e.g., pH, fO2) and with increased sample volumes and enhanced sample analysis and recovery capabilities.
d. Compile a comprehensive database of thermochemical properties and speciation of C-O-H-N fluids and phases to upper mantle P-T conditions.
e. Achieve a fundamental understanding of carbon bonding at core P-T conditions.
1. To improve our understanding of the
physical and chemical behavior of carbon
at extreme conditions found in the deep
interiors of Earth and other planets.
Decadal Goals
a. Real-time monitoring of volcanic activity & gas emissions from the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
b. Estimate total carbon in Earth’s mantle accurate to within a factor of two.
c. Estimate rates of carbon sequestration at subduction zones.
2. To identify the principal deep carbon
reservoirs and to assess the total
carbon budget of Earth.
Decadal Goals
a. Develop techniques to resolve the relative roles of biotic versus abiotic hydrocarbon production, with experimental investigation of abiotic methane synthesis under lower crust and upper mantle conditions.
b. Develop techniques to characterize nanoscale organic molecules from key samples (including the Moho and Mars), including their compositions, structures, and isotopic characteristics.
c. Explore the possible roles of subsurface organic molecules in the origins of life.
d. Investigate the carbon cycle in deep time, including the coevolution of the geosphere and biosphere.
3. To document the nature, sources,
and evolution of subsurface organic
molecules, including hydrocarbons
and biomolecules.
Decadal Goals
a. Conduct a global 3-D census of deep microbial life, presented in an interactive 3-D web-based platform.
b. Explore the extreme P-T limits of life through laboratory investigation of microbes under deep crustal conditions.
c. Investigate biomolecular adaptations under extreme conditions.
4. To assess the nature and extent of the deep microbial
biosphere.
Physics and Chemistry
• Reservoirs and Fluxes Directorate
Erik Hauri, Carnegie Institution of Washington Bernard Marty, CRPG-CNRS • Deep Life Directorate
Isabelle Daniel, Université Claude Bernard Lyon1 Mitch Sogin, Marine Biological Lab, Woods Hole • Deep Energy Directorate
David Cole, Ohio State University Chris Ballentine, University of Manchester • Physics and Chemistry of Carbon Directorate Giulia Galli, University of California, Davis Craig Manning, University of California, Los Angeles
DCO Science Directorate CoChairs
Physics and Chemistry
Executive Committee
John Baross Baross, University of Washington, USA
L. Taras Bryndzia, Shell Oil Projects & Technology, USA
David Cole, Ohio State University, USA
Isabelle Daniel, Université Claude Bernard Lyon1, France
Giulia Galli, University of California, Davis, USA
Erik Hauri, Carnegie Institution of Washington, USA
* Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institution of Washington *DCO PI
Russell Hemley, Carnegie Institution of Washington
Claude Jaupart, IPGP, France
Adrian Jones, University College London, United Kingdom
Eiji Ohtani, Tohoku University, Japan
Barbara Sherwood Lollar, University of Toronto, Canada
Nikolai Sobolev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
ExOfficio
Jesse Ausubel, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Craig Schiffries, Deep Carbon Observatory
DCO Website: http://dco.ciw.edu
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Carbon is Central to Our Lives
• Carbon is the element of life, providing the chemical backbone for all essential biomolecules.
• Carbon-based fuels supply most of our energy, while carbon-bearing molecules in the atmosphere play a major role in climate change.
• Yet in spite of carbon’s importance we remain largely ignorant of the physical, chemical, and biological behavior of carbon-bearing systems at depths of more than a few kilometers.
• Past consideration of the global carbon cycle has focused primarily on oceans, atmosphere, and shallow surface environments, with the implicit understanding that these reservoirs exchange carbon relatively rapidly as an essentially closed system.
Carbon is Central to Our Lives
• Our knowledge of the deep interior, which may contain more than 90% of Earth’s carbon, is limited.
• We do not know how much carbon is stored in Earth’s interior, the nature of deep reservoirs, or how carbon moves from one deep repository to another.
• We are largely ignorant of the nature and extent of deep microbial ecosystems, which by some estimates rival the total surface biomass.
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