Jeffrey Dervicio: you are listening science, quickI’m Jeff Dervicio.
Well, I don’t know about all of you, but for those of us on the show, there are days when we just want to explore. And we have a very sweet day’s job of talking to people who delve into the depths of those mystical places, and today I joined her two explorers. They literally seek out the deepest unknown that exists on this planet.
Karen Lloyd is a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee and soon to be enrolled at the University of Southern California. Peter Barry is a geochemist and volcanologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Hello Karen. Hello peter.
Karen Lloyd: oi.
Peter Barry: Hey Jeff.
Dervicio: Thank you for joining us today. So let’s get started. Tell us about the unknown places that you like the most and are looking for.
Peter, would you like to go first?
Barry: Yes, it is. I am a volcanologist and geochemist and love to study volcanic systems and hot springs around the world.and what we are trying to do is Visit different locations with natural volcanic eruptions. There is gas and liquid is coming to the surface. What I can do is collect those gases and liquids and bring them back to a lab here in Massachusetts to measure the chemistry of those systems.
I specialize in the measurement of stable isotopes, stable isotopes such as carbon and helium. And basically, we can fingerprint these different volcanic systems to understand where the fluids and gases in matter come from deep inside the Earth. I love to And it’s amazing to see completely different signs depending on where you go.
Dervicio: Very cool. Karen, are you
Lloyd: I thought it was really ironic that the place you just returned to a few weeks ago has such a high elevation. that’s what we want to do. Because there are unknowns out there. We know very little about the interior of the Earth’s crust.
It’s hard to just dig in. You cannot see through the earth. Nothing can be dropped from behind the ship. Like it can be done at sea, it has to be drilled, is expensive, and takes years to prepare. One of the things Peter and I and his colleagues do is he uses natural hot springs to take some of that deep subterranean environment and bring it all back to the surface.
And we’re trying to get these liquids directly out of the ground. Our most recent location was in the Puna region of Jujuy, Argentina, with her colleague Agostina Chiodi. And she’s great. It looks like she planned this entire trip. It was a very heavy lift, but we drove the whole way. I think I ran over 8,000km in about 10 days.
Sampling hot springs everywhere, dealing with headaches and nausea from living above 15,000 feet each day for 10 straight days, no lead-in, no acclimatization. But there were some great, great samples. But I love the irony of going deep, we have to go high.
Dervicio: You know, I’m talking about two things that, at first glance, seem unrelated. One is like deep rocks and the other is of microscopic life. So how did you come to speak scientifically? Why are you working together when your fields seem so different?
Lloyd: Can I think you want it now?
Barry: You can do it. Karen, please.
Lloyd: For years I thought I needed to understand what was going on with the microbes in the crust. , is a geologist who wants to talk to me. I never met Peter, although he attended this conference in 2015.
And it seemed that I made a beeline. I ran over them. As soon as he stopped talking, I knew I wanted to do this.
Barry: yeah, it was. I remember this meeting and looking around the room and not just having the geological perspective that I have, but trying to understand what’s going on from a biological perspective and try to connect them I realized that it is really important to
Dervicio: Is there life under the crust? It sounds unkind in many ways, but is it true?
Lloyd: It seems unkind only if we have a narrow view of how life can exist on this planet. As you deepen, suddenly more habitable space opens up on Earth. It is currently estimated that there are about 10,000 times more living cells in the Earth’s crust than there are stars in the universe.
It is currently a very important biome on Earth and little known. We’re still asking really basic questions about it.
Dervicio: How does it compare to surface life like biomass? Is there a way down here?
Lloyd: The way to express this in the context of total biomass on Earth is that these are tiny cells, much smaller biomass than what’s on the surface given where the energy source is coming from. There are things like giant burning suns that literally give power to trees, grass, etc.
So there is definitely more living biomass on the surface than underground. I want to be clear about that. But those underground can eat not only the sad little skins of life that cling to anything that falls, but the remains of dead animals and what’s out there. However, there are additional sources of energy within our planet that support different ecosystems.
Dervicio: Are there many things you didn’t know were alive? What are your thoughts on life in the crust?
Lloyd: We are so obsessed with the sun that we tend to think of life as based on sunlight, seasons, and day/night cycles. But our Earth’s crust has a separate ecosystem, which is instead fueled by energy that comes from chemical reactions in the Earth’s crust. Being independent.
And the other is that they are very diverse in what they can breathe. That’s why we breathe oxygen. that’s it. All animals breathe oxygen as plants breathe. Plants produce oxygen during the day, but they also breathe at night. So they breathe oxygen. We’re all like one-trick ponies here. And underground, the transition metals in the middle of the periodic table are suddenly activated.
They can use all this stuff. There are microorganisms that can breathe palladium, copper, nickel, antimony, vanadium, selenium, etc. and arsenic. It’s very toxic to us. But for them it is like oxygen. Like breathing, some organisms can even breathe carbon dioxide. It, as you know, is reduced inside the cell to get energy.
For us, it’s the final product. It’s literally a waste of our time. You can’t do anything with CO2.
Dervicio: Oh, carbon dioxide. What does Peter, the geochemist here, think about his research, carbon on the surface, and what can be done deep inside?
Barry: I’m wondering what’s going on from things like the geological carbon cycle, how much carbon is coming out of volcanoes, how much carbon is leaving Earth due to subduction processes and plate tectonic processes. We’re trying to understand what’s going back inside. And it provides a baseline for understanding what’s going on with human waste. How do we use these microbes? So we are not necessarily studying whether we can sequester the carbon we have.
We find the first link between the natural geological carbon cycle and where that carbon resides, where it can be trapped in the Earth’s crust by both geological and biological processes. It’s just creating order and links. Only in the last five or ten years has people really started to focus on how can we extract some of that carbon, how can we sequester it, how can we put it into these depleted oil and gas reservoirs? , can be stored for a long time. Geological age?
So basically flip, flip, how quickly can you isolate and put it back instead of how quickly can you extract and burn to balance the system?
Lloyd: One important thing to know is that there are natural deposits of CO2. You know, putting things down in the form of carbon dioxide has precedent. So this is not so completely unnatural. It turns out to be like a giant machine with many knobs and turning points. And many of them now have big question marks.
What does it take to tune the system the way we want it? , what they’re doing to know what they’re doing, etc.
Dervicio: I wanted to leave the listeners with a little surprise, wondering if there’s anything I can say about the world we don’t know beneath our feet. what will it be?
Barry: As you know, for the last 50 years or so, we only understood plate tectonics. Carbon, water, and other volatiles move between the surface and interior of the Earth in this highly dynamic system. As you know, the Earth is incredibly unique. And to see how that’s actually going into this, this very rich biology and microbiology that people like Karen are studying is very fascinating to me.2 Because there’s no doubt that the two are ultimately connected, and that’s what makes this planet so unique.
Lloyd: I think almost all of them are in the deep branches of life that we know nothing about. So we’re talking about slime molds versus us, things that are as different from us as sponges, or even more different from us than sponges. I mean, there are all these strains that have evolved to do something interesting, wonderful, weird, or different, and you literally have no idea what they’re doing.
We don’t know what they are doing. So it’s like having aliens on Earth with us. they are not aliens. they are related to us. They came from Earth, but we know nothing about them. We don’t know if aliens exist.
Dervicio: That is wonderful. And dear listeners, longing for more microbes. Karen and Peter are rendered as adorable cartoon scientists, and the movie we have on the site right now unearths borrowings to it, and the transcript documents the FBI. A Scotch named Mick It features subterranean microbes that contain , and is worth spending five minutes of your time on.
Barry: For example, our buddy Mick is from about a mile down the Mariana Trench.
Microbial Microphone: People hear that I live under the earth’s crust, are they as if from hell? But what do you know? i’m just a normal guy Mick, microbes. Mickey I happen to live in the earth. And we get another way of doing things there.
Dervicio: Karen and Peter, thank you for chatting with us today. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Lloyd: thank us.
Barry: Thank you very much, Jeff.
Dervicio: science, quick is produced by me, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper and Tulika Bose. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.like and subscribe science, quick Get podcasts anywhere. For more science news and longer articles, visit sciam.com.for science soonthis is Jeff Dervicio.
