Briefs

Submersible version of mass spectrometer would tell a lot about life deep under the sea

Monday, May 23, 2005, By Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Sometimes in science, you just have to be there.

In October 1993, for instance, oceanographer John Delaney just had to see what happened on the ocean floor following an earthquake.

When he and his University of Washington colleagues reached the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the Pacific Northwest coast in the deep-sea submersible Alvin, they found the water filled with "marine snow," vast amounts of microbial material billowing up from beneath the seafloor.

These microbes would come to be known as Archaea, a fundamentally different form of life that thrived in temperatures near boiling. And scientists now knew that life didn't just exist in the upper layers of sediments, but could be found deep within Earth's crust.

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Called the Tethered Yearlong Spectrometer, or TETHYS, it could operate for months on its own, checking for dissolved chemicals released from the seafloor, for biological chemicals that might reflect the health of deep sea life and for environmental pollutants.

Here is the full story on Data mining down under the ocean.