Deep Carbon Observatory
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| Abbreviation | DCO |
|---|---|
| Formation | 2009 |
| Purpose | Transforming our understanding of carbon in Earth's interior |
| Website | deepcarbon.net |
The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a global research program designed to transform understanding of carbon's role in Earth. DCO is a community of scientists, including biologists, physicists, geoscientists and chemists, whose work crosses several traditional disciplinary lines to develop the new, integrative field of deep carbon science. To complement this research, the DCO’s infrastructure includes public engagement and education, online and offline community support, innovative data management, and novel instrumentation development.
In 2007, Robert Hazen, a Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory (Washington, DC, USA) spoke at the Century Club in New York, on the origins of life on Earth and how geophysical reactions may have played a critical role in the development of life on Earth. Jesse Ausubel, a faculty member at Rockefeller University and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, was in attendance and later sought out Hazen’s book, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins.
After two years of planning and collaboration, Hazen and colleagues officially launched the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) in August 2009, with its Secretariat based at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC. Hazen and Ausubel, along with input from over 100 scientists invited to participate in the Deep Carbon Cycle Workshop in 2008, expanded their original idea. No longer focused solely on the origin of life on Earth, the group instead clarified their position to further human understanding of Earth, carbon, that critical element, had to take center stage.
The Deep Carbon Observatory's research considers the global carbon cycle beyond Earth's surface. It explores high-pressure and extreme temperature organic synthesis, complex interactions between organic molecules and minerals, conducts field observations of deep microbial ecosystems and of anomalies in petroleum geochemistry, and constructs theoretical models of lower crust and upper mantle carbon sources and sinks.
The Deep Carbon Observatory is structured around four Science Communities: Reservoirs and Fluxes, Deep Life, Deep Energy, and Extreme Physics and Chemistry.
Reservoirs and Fluxes
The Reservoirs and Fluxes Community explores the storage and transport of carbon in Earth’s deep interior. The subduction of tectonic plates and volcanic outgassing are primary vehicles for carbon fluxes to and from deep Earth, but the processes and rates of these fluxes, as well as their variation throughout Earth's history, remain poorly understood. In addition DCO research on primitive chondritic meteorites indicates that Earth is relatively depleted in highly volatile elements compared to chondrites, though DCO's research is further examining whether large reservoirs of carbon may be hidden in the mantle and core. Members of the Reservoirs and Fluxes Community are conducting research as a part of the Deep Earth Carbon Degassing Project to make tangible advances towards quantifying the amount of carbon outgassed from the Earth’s deep interior (core, mantle, crust) into the surface environment (e.g. biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere) through naturally occurring processes.
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