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

• News and events

• Opportunities

• Science highlights

• Organization

• Register for monthly

newsletter

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.