So Alvin is the United States' only deep diving, human occupied submersible that's used for science.

It's kind of best known for being on the discovery of the Titanic.

this is sort of a rare vehicle to get the chance to use.

Today, it's being used to study the mysteries of carbon in the ocean.

Dissolved organic carbon is the largest reservoir of organic matter in the oceans.

Methane in the seafloor is the most abundant form of methane on Earth.

It's a massive amount of carbon, and These researchers are trying to understand how it moves through the ocean as the Earth and its waters are transformed by climate change.

So, a big part of the trip is coloring all these cups.

And they're going to go down with the Alvin, I believe, and basically, the pressure at 800 meters down is so intense that it compresses all of the little air pockets in the styrofoam, and it shrinks them down to, like, kind of the size of, like a shot glass.

This is my first time sailing on the Atlantis.

The Atlantis has a terrific reputation as a world class vessel for supporting world class science.

And I understand now that the science is supported by the technical staff, by the engineers, by the captain, and the navigators at a level that I had not been previously accustomed to.

The science in this journey is focused on a mysterious substance known as dissolved organic carbon.

it's chemicals and it's dissolved.

Like tea.

Okay, tea's a great example.

You know, tea... you have these leaves for whatever kind of tea you like, and you put it in water, you have to heat it, and those compounds come up, that's dissolved organic carbon, that's dissolved organic matter.

A few years ago, Laura contacted me about this idea she had for a proposal.

And of course, we've all known John for a really long time as well.

And so I was like, he had this paper and it had a really cool idea.

We found that the dissolved organic carbon coming out of a methane seep some 500 kilometers north of here was considerably older than the surrounding dissolved organic matter.

Scientists don't know the exact origins of all the DOC in the ocean or what it's made of, but the older age of DOC near seeps is a clue.

Methane forms slowly over geologic time, so these seeps are a source of older carbon that started as living things.

It was organic matter in the surface deposited down on the seafloor.

And then more and more sediments pile on top of it, and as it gets pressed down, it gets converted into methane.

And also, ethane and propane and other hydrocarbons.

And that's a thermogenic gas source The methane stored in ocean sediments is about equal to the organic carbon found on land, soils, the atmosphere, and seawater combined.

To put that in perspective, organic carbon includes all living things, all dead thin that are decomposing, and chemical compounds that formed from decomposing organisms.

Compounds such as petroleum and methane.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and there is a lot of it buried in ocean sediments in its solid form known as gas hydrate.

Methane seeps into the water column in gas form, but most of this gas doesn't enter the atmosphere.

And once we understand where all the carbon is going, we then develop models as to how to understand what the impact of warming the oceans and acidifying the oceans will have ultimately on the atmosphere, because that's what's really controlling our climate in terms of the direct impact on temperatures.

Before they can understand the big ocean carbon picture, they need to understand the mysterious relationship between methane and dissolved organic carbon.

This team has brought gear from all over the country and overseas to Astoria, Oregon.

Here they set up a lab on the Atlantis.

When you bring in 23 scientists to move in the same space and work in a coordinated fashion, it requires a level of organization that everyone has to subscribe to.

So the real challenge is, is setting it up.

Everyone's not really aware of how things need to be set up.

So you're communicating constantly with everyone.

You're getting everything set up.

Then the process begins.

This is actually my first time on a boat.

Yes.

Downfalls: I was sick.

So it was a lot of weather, lots of swell, lots of waves going out there.

People weren't feeling well.

I wasn't feeling well.

The study was designed to visit the Hydrate Ridge gas hydrate system seeps, which is offshore of Oregon.

The reason we've chosen that site as our primary study site is we know from previous studies that the methane that's coming out of the seafloor there is ancient fossil carbon, which would potentially affect the ocean carbon cycle.

After several choppy hours, the Atlantis is over Hydrate Ridge.

The crew gets right to work.

I think a lot of us make a concerted effort to get undergraduate students out here on the ship.

As I just remembered my own undergraduate experience, where you're studying science, but you you don't necessarily get a real feel for how it actua Science.

We're doing a cast here to collect water to do an analysis of gas and other organic compounds in the water column.

Right now, we're just watching the depth get down to about 850.

That's the seafloor.

And then once it gets there, we'll turn it around, bring it up and start firing bottles to open and catch the water.

Bottle number three.

Fire.

Being out here, it gives you a hands on experience, demonstrates the successes.

It demonstrates a lot of the problems and difficulties.

By the time the CTD cast reached the ocean bottom, harsh waves had pushed the Atlantis over a kilometer from their target site.

that's the... that's our site.

And then that's where it ended up.

It's called it's like a therapy.

Yeah.

One of the... our project team for our Google Drive is SeepDOM 2023 or bust.

And I was joking that we should just circle the bust part.

That might be the There was an alternartive in the name..

It was a mistake maybe.

Yeah, foreshadowing.

The rough weather at Hydrate Ridge makes it unsafe to launch the Alvin, but the crew is keeping busy.

We finished 3 a.m. last night processing yesterday's CTD samples.

And then today we started again around ten.

And this is our second CTD of the day.

And then later today we're going to do a multi-core.

Fortunately, with the help of some of our other collaborators, we were able to bring something called a multicore.

That was also really cool because it had the camera on it.

So it's not quite as precise as the Alvin.

But still we were able to sit in the control room and watch the camera and get a really good idea of where the sediment core was going to go down.

The Atlantis moves the multicore over the sea bottom as they look for signs of methane seeps.

The most important thing we look for are bacterial mats.

And that's a telltale sign that there's fluid or chemicals being released at the seafloor.

Most microbial mats are very white We also see an association with that sulfitic products that may precipitate with iron that are very black.

So we look for black stuff, or the clams, you know, the biota that could be there.

When they find the spot, the multicore crashes down and presses four tubes into the sediment.

It then comes up with ocean mud, and they smell it.

This is good stuff.

It's like if you've ever smelled low tide, you know, that kind of like stinky smell or rotten eggs or something like that.

It's like that, but like a hundred times worse.

Our nose is, like, super sensitive for sulfide.

And it's really important because it is the byproduct of the microbial reaction that we're looking for, that sulfate reduction taking sulfate and potentially methane, with organisms working together to take those compounds and eventually make sulfide the rotten egg smell.

Another product of that process is dissolved organic carbon.

So the smell of sulfur is a sign that microbes, living things, are converting methane to DOC.

And that's their hypothesis.

But do you see these little worm tubes?

This is like, this is really living mud.

This is really active stuff.

This is not like seafloor abyss, nothing to eat land.

This clam came up in one of the cores.

It has a relationship with microbes that allows both species together to consume hydrogen sulfide.

So this is an acharax.

It's indicative of a kind of a low flux methane setting, and it's a little translucent, if you can see that.

So this is very specific to this kind of system, With mud and water samples, they can get to work.

The problem is they keep getting knocked around by waves.

This makes it hard to sample accurately.

It makes it hard to walk.

Well, unfortunately, weather did not permit much work at Hydrate Ridge.

We collected one multicore.

We got some useful samples from that.

It was clear, based on the weather forecast, that no other diving would take place at Hydrate Ridge.

It's not an easy task to change everything that you had just planned, you know, a year or longer.

And, you know, it's been years with this project.

So that that part was a little bit hard, No, we're going to do... We're- The whole original Hydrate Ridge program would be moved to Astoria- Everything.

Those are big rocks.

Oh, but that's fine.

We have folks from Geomar here, and they have worked in a Astoria Canyon.

And so they had it in their minds already.

It's got the clams.

Astoria Canyon is just a few hours away from Hydrate Ridge.

We have been here before in 2019 on a cruise and we we have all the maps, we have all the information.

And I knew that also the USGS, they have tons of information about the site.

So it a good alternative, I guess.

Astoria Canyon has a lot of the features that Hydrate Ridge has.

There are many distinctions, but there are many places in Astoria Canyon where gas is fluxing to the seafloor, and where hydrate- gas hydrate- is occurring on the seafloor.

One of our ideas with the project is that it should be everywhere.

This, this idea that you're getting methane- derived carbon into the food web, It strengthens that argument to say, like this is potentially an important global process.

Now, finally, the team can use the Alvin.

Two first timers!

Yeah.

We're basically going down to collect push cores to do chemical analysis, biological analysis, and collect and collect gas samples.

We're looking at gas composition.

It's kind of crazy, isn't it?

It's incredible.

There's just so much life.

It's not just a cool ride.

The Alvin can take samples with So we could say, oh we want to go after this microbial mat.

And so you can place the arm right in the mat and get really targeted samples.

These are actually piercing the mat.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just a really high flux mat.

Okay.

The best sandwich I ever had at 850 meters under the ocean.

Delicious.

Anna we're recording.

What do you think about that dive?

That was incredible.

Yes, it's a lot busier.

There's a lot more action than I thought there would be.

It was an awesome time.

We had a great pilot, and everything went really well and according to plan.

And then we're excited to head back to the surface.

I hope you had a nice dive.

We had a wonderful dive.

So this very special occasion on your first dive.

Of course we have something.

So we coronate you as the king of DOM.

Queen of DOM.

Oh!

Wow!

Oh.

So set it right here.

Once the core comes up, we'll take it into the lab.

We'll, cut it into slices.

Look at this.

Three different colors.

Some of them, we will take little subsamples of the sediment itself.

Just took a sample of sediment from the core and I'm going to preserve this at four degrees for, maybe for doing some cultivation of micro organisms.

Other pieces of core we will put it into what we call a core squeezer, and try and expel all the fluids that's in between particles of sediment.

So I am part of Squeezerville as it has become to be known.

I run the ion chromatography machine, which is what we have here on the ship.

My job here is to collect hydrogen and more molecular biology.

I'm involved in the a isoberic gas type sampling, So what we're trying to do is measure the pH and alkalinity.

Measure the methane concentrations in of the sediments that come up in the cores, water column if we needed to.

My PhD it is in the molecular characterization from microbial-derived molecules.

it's actually hard to keep track of all of the science we're doing.

It's incredible that it's branched out this far.

It started from this proposal but there are other kind of spin off questions that come up.

If methane- derived carbon is converted to DOC, can it easily be taken up by other organisms, which has implications for the food web?

So that's what Ellen is interested in.

There is also characterizing what it is.

We really don't know that much about it.

So Rachel's, figuring out what that DOM is made of.

When I get back to the lab, I'll be conducting incubations where I'm kind of trying to replicate what's happening at the seep setting and seeing if that methane is converted to DOM or DOC.

It's been a really collaborative and really intriguing environment to work in.

We're all from different areas of the world.

So this is just a really, amazing experience to have everyone together on a ship like this All that science needs samples.

But weather is too rough for an Alvin dive today.

So you just found out that you're going to dive tomorrow?

Yes, but if they dive.

Yeah, I'm excited about that.

Yes.

That's like, that's like one of my biggest career dreams, I think, to get to do something like that.

So I hope it pans out.

It'd be amazing.

We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine.

Ellen.

Congratulations.

In recognition of your successful Alvin dive, and for your masterful extraction of pore fluids, we hereby anoint you the Empress of Pore Water.

I think it's really easy to get, like, sucked into, you know, our chemistries or geological work that we do, but, like, actually seeing the site, I think, like, is a really good reminder of, like, this is like the earth that we're studying and and so I think that's part of what makes it really special.

We can see the bearing to the submarine.

We can see how far away.

So right now it's saying it's 570m away from the ship.

753 meters deep.

They locate sample sites using hydroacoustic data.

What are they looking for?

What do they want to see the to identify if that's what they want to core?

Soft, basically a soft sediment to take it to take a core.

Because if it's a strong reflection, then we are going to hit something th So there's the marker.

But I can't see anything.

Right.

So if we... Today was an atypical dive.

It was the weirdest thing.

And we had one of the stranger experiences that I've experienced where we were actually adopted by a school of fish that actually made it a little bit challenging for us to work.

Yep.

Great.

This is so insane.

This is so insane.

Oh my God.

They would make such a cloud of sediment that we couldn't see anything.

We couldn't even see the arm of the submarine to do anything.

I did that completely blind.

But I'm waiting to see what it looks like because I can't see it anymore.

I do not have a ton of dive experience But the people who have a lot of dive experience are the pilots, the pilot who was with us today, Danick Forsman, this is his 62nd dive on Alvin, and he has lots of dives on other vehicles.

And he said he had never seen or heard of anything like what happened today happening.

Yeah.

A massive school fish.

There's probably 70 fish there.

During the course of their five hour dive, the size of our friends just grew and grew and grew.

And we became one of the school.

I feel quite honored to be made a friend of the seafloor.

So I see an outcrop to the right.

Oh.

Big one.

Oh.

Vertical.

Oh, there we go.

We were diving in an area with extreme topography and with these very large carbonate structures that form these very steep ridges, almost vertical ridges.

And that's a product of the methane reaching the seafloor.

And then it's oxidized, converted to carbon dioxide and actually forms a mineral known as calcite that forms these very large structures.

So it was sort of just rugged terrain.

These sable fish are a commercially important seafood species.

They spend time near methane seeps, and they eat.

But there's a lot we don't know about the food web around these seeps.

When microbes convert methane to DOC, that DOC enters the food web.

It feeds small things like microbes and plankton and the things that eat them.

And on and on up the food web.

my God.

Yeah, look at it.

Nuts.

Oh, my God, this is crazy.

There is like, there's more of it now.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

We just gonna.

I think what happened is we've gone up, attracted every single fish and brought it around with us.

And that's what happens like throughout the day.

They just keep coming Nope.

That fish just blew it for us.

Yep.

That's that.

We lost it.

The weather at Astoria Canyon deteriorates.

After three dives, the research team has a lot of samples and a lot of squished cups.

But the ish-cursed dive is the last of the trip.

The team now relies more heavily on the multicore.

It's exciting because we targeted right where the gas hydrate was seen to out from the seafloor.

And when we pulled up the multi-core, we had four very nice cores of sediment that were bubbling.

So we we certainly captured the methane.

And now we can use that as a marker to look for methane-derived carbon in the whole project.

Another tool lets them probe more deeply: the gravity core.

Oh!

I mean little bubbles are coming out like right there.

One of the really interesting discoveries that we made in some of the cores at the very end, was the presence of petroleum.

Yeah.

That smells diesel-ly.

Yeah.

Right.

We were focusing mainly on methane.

And it turns out that there's what we call thermogenic hydrocarbons.

And this is petroleum or crude oil.

Petroleum and methane are both hydrocarbons, and they both form from dead organisms.

Petroleum is older, though it doesn't come from dinosaurs, as you may have heard.

And it forms deeper down.

To get the samples they needed, the SeepDOC crew worked in shifts around the clock for a week and a half.

I think we squeezed about, like, 13 to 14 liters of pore water.

Which is something like 450 samples.

And I was calculating earlier, that's like 270,000 drops of water, which is kind of the rates that they come out of our squeezers.

That water they squeeze from the mud, the mud itself, and the water around the seeps.

All of those samples served to prove or disprove their hypothesis.

They wanted to see if microbes played a major role in converting methane to dissolved organic carbon, taking a potent greenhouse gas, and using it to fuel a deep sea food web.

The preliminary lab work they've done on board seems to support their hypothesis.

Which is not surprising.

We were expecting it to be happening here, but it's it's good to confirm on board that that it's actually occurring.

So it makes us feel good about all the samples we collected.

Now we have the data set to address those hypotheses.

They now have years of work ahead of them to do the science and make their case.

And ultimately, what our responsibility as scientists is to write this down in publications so that other scientists and the public can be aware of what we're doing out here.

Why is it important for how the carbon cycle on the Earth is operating, and its sensitivity to climate change and other aspects?

Loads of methane in these syringes!

A few days ago, it looked like they might not get the samples they needed, but they were able to pivot and persevere.

Part of that was planning, But a lot of it was the crew they assembled.

Not only did we bring in all the expertise, but just really great people.

And that makes it really nice on a boat when a lot is happening and it's a little stressful.

Things are changing and seas aren't great.

When we first stepped on this ship together as a group, it just felt like we've been working together for so long.