October 20, 2011

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North Pond: Picture Day

By Katrina Edwards

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Follow Dr. Katrina Edwards, as she explores the microbial life at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

10-19-2011

Remember picture day as a kid? When you or your parent(s) picked out an outfit suitable for that picture that would immortilize your face for that school year? Well, today was that day out here. For our group pictures anyhow. And we even picked out the outfits for everyone on the scientific party – our “Mainly Microbe” T-shirts! In the history of ocean drilling I do not think this has been done before. We looked awesome, of course. We took science and crew picture, science party pictures, and all the various subgroups within the scientific party such as the microbiologists, the petrologists, and etc. This was the highlight of my day – you can tell it is still slow around here.

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We are having difficulty with drilling for setting in the 10 ¾ casing. Our drill bit stopped hard and refused to make hole progress so we had to trip the pipe out and are going to have a look at that drill bit to see if it failed prematurely . Normally they should last 50+ hours and we hadn’t reached that time yet. Bits can on occasion just fail, though, and the evidence we have suggests exactly that.

Meanwhile we had some success in another analysis we got hung up on earlier in the cruise. In addition to bringing out the new deep-biosphere probbing tool, DEBI-t, we brought out a tabletop version to scan cores that had been recovered as well. This did not work out too well – we had trouble with vibrations from the rocking ship and then problems with the stage on which the sample sits. Those problems were finally rectified and now we’ve got our first really cool image of the surfaces of one of the rocks covered in microbes – our first direct evidence from a subseafloor rock that there is indeed life down there! Not that we’re surprised, after all it is what we are here to do, but still….it is satisfying to get results and data.

Katrina Edwards is a geomicrobiologist who studies the microbiology of hydrothermal sulfides and the igneous ocean crust. She has particular fascination with one common, yet elusive microbial group associated with these deep habitats, the iron oxidizing bacteria. These are the bacteria that make rust. She received her Ph.D. in geomicrobiology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1999 and spent the following 7 years as a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, USA. This is where she "sunk to the bottom of the ocean" and never came back up. She is now a Professor of Biology and Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and is the Director of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), an NSF sponsored program created at USC expressly for the study of the deep marine biosphere. Katrina has a husband and three children waiting at home for her during this long expedition.

More by Katrina Edwards

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