Quantifying Thermal and Chemical Conditions within Active Seafloor Vent Deposits

量化活跃海底喷口沉积物内的热和化学条件

• 批准号: 1130019
• 负责人: Margaret Tivey
• 金额: $ 25.06万
• 依托单位: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-09-15 至 2015-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1130019&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Quantifying; Thermal; Chemical; Conditions; within

A wide variety of unique chemosynthetic microbes live in the steep thermal and geochemical gradients present in seafloor hydrothermal vent chimney walls, some of which have the potential for producing unique biochemicals that can be used for various health and pharmachological purposes. These microbes and others survive in hydrothermal systems without the benefit of light from the sun and feed off hot, reduced fluids spewing out of the subsurface on mid-ocean ridges. The thermal gradients in waters coming from these vents change from temperatures up to 400C to 2C on the order of a few centimeters. Due to these steep gradients, it is not presently possible to make quantitative physical measurements of the geochemical characteristics of these resulting microhabitats. This in turn makes it difficult to understand how the various unique microbial life forms that live in these extreme environments carry out their metabolic processes and interact with one another and their changing geochemical environment. This research solves the problem by creating a user-friendly modeling code, based on reversible and irreversible thermodynamics and incorporating the effects of advection and diffusion, that can be used to determine specific geochemical characteristics of hydrothermal fluids in vent chimneys given various chemical, thermal, and physical boundary conditions. The code will be tested using the characteristics and measurements that have been made at five well known hydrothermal vent sites. Broader impacts of the work include building infrastructure for science through the creation of a user-friendly bioenergetics code with a companion user manual that will be made publicly available on the Internet. The code has crossover potential into the field of microbiology and fields associated with examining life in extreme environments and bio-prospecting, both of which have implications for pharmacology and discovering new compounds to improve human health. In addition, the work also supports a female research scientist as well as trains a female graduate student in computational geoscience.

海底热液喷口烟囱壁中存在的陡峭的温度和地球化学梯度中生活着多种独特的化学合成微生物，其中一些微生物具有产生可用于各种健康和药理学目的的独特生化物质的潜力。 这些微生物和其他微生物在没有太阳光的热液系统中生存，并以洋中脊地下喷出的热的、还原的液体为食。 来自这些喷口的水中的温度梯度从高达 400°C 变化到 2°C，变化幅度约为几厘米。 由于这些陡峭的梯度，目前不可能对这些微生境的地球化学特征进行定量物理测量。 这反过来又使得人们很难理解生活在这些极端环境中的各种独特的微生物生命形式如何进行其代谢过程并彼此相互作用以及它们不断变化的地球化学环境。 这项研究通过创建一个用户友好的建模代码来解决这个问题，该代码基于可逆和不可逆热力学并结合平流和扩散的影响，可用于确定喷口烟囱中热液流体的特定地球化学特征（考虑到各种化学、热、和物理边界条件。 该代码将使用在五个众所周知的热液喷口地点进行的特性和测量进行测试。这项工作的更广泛影响包括通过创建用户友好的生物能量学代码以及将在互联网上公开发布的配套用户手册来构建科学基础设施。 该代码具有跨入微生物学领域以及与极端环境下的生命检查和生物勘探相关的领域的潜力，这两个领域都对药理学和发现改善人类健康的新化合物具有影响。 此外，这项工作还支持一名女性研究科学家，并培训一名计算地球科学领域的女性研究生。