ever since i was a kid i've been fascinated by ocean life and now i have the privilege of spending my life learning about the organisms that live in the ocean it's easy for us as land animals to forget that most of our planet is is ocean and you know one of my favorite quotes is by arthur c clarke when he says house how strange it is to call this planet earth when it's clearly ocean and you know eighty percent of all habit places on earth is deep sea that's that's not even counting the upper kilometer of ocean or upper half mile eighty percent of any habitable place on earth is deep ocean and that's everything you can think of from the serengeti to the tundra deserts brain for sue name it eighty percent of all have a place is deep sea and we literally know less about that habitat than we do about other planets we can look up at the moon and with a telescope you can see the surface of the moon and see craters and mountain ranges and all that but because of the challenge of doing that through water we've literally seen less of the sea floor now what's really cool about the deep sea is that it's an environment unlike anything we've experienced it's cold it's perpetually dark so once you get to about a kilometer down there is no sunlight that reaches the deps and this immense volume of our biosphere harbors some of the most incredible organisms that you can imagine so many of us think about the really exotic fish that we see down there the angler fish the the giant jellies and the like but would really excites me about the deep sea are the microbes that live there when you think about an environment that's eighty percent of your biosphere it's you have to realize that what happens there is going to have consequences for the rest of the world and in fact it's the microbes that live in the ocean that run our planet you know some people actually call them the stewards of our planet and it's their activity that keeps our water clean microbes in the ocean produce half the oxygen in our atmosphere and they play a huge role in providing the the literally providing the minerals and nutrients needed for plants and animals in the shallower parts of our ocean to grow and to feed not only that ecosystem but provide food for humankind so so these microbes are perennially fascinating because they are so different from all the other life on earth at the end of the day what we do as human beings that is we eat organic stuff and i don't mean organic in the grocery store sense of the word but i mean we eat plants and we eat animals and we harness energy from that food and from that oxygen now microbes are far more exotic in how they create energy and how they work with materials and that's why that's it's that exotic those exotic physiologies those exotic biochemical capacities that enable them to clean the water and to produce oxygen and so on it's also easy to forget just how many microbes there are there are somewhere between ten to the twenty six and ten to the twenty seventh microbes in the ocean that is a gigantic number so it's another one with twenty six or twenty seven zero is behind it and when you think of microbes and gigantic numbers it's easy to think well ok there's a lot of them but they're small so you know a million of them fit in a teaspoon of water so just how big content of the twenty six b well if you assume that there are ten of the twenty seventh microbes and if you assume that there are micron each in length which is about right and you were to put them and on and you would end up with ten to the twenty first meters or in other words you're going to end up with something over one hundred light years of microbes so that means you could have microbes strong and on and from earth out one hundred light years into space actually more than one hundred light years in this space to me that's mind blowing when you consider that the nearest star which we have not yet visited is five light years away and so this idea that these little tiny microbes you know could stretch out past the nearest star to me is just a reminder of how many there are and the fact that we're clearly out numbered and and how grateful i am for them because they were they keep our planet habitable now if you took all those microbes and you put them on a scale and you weighed them against all of humankind there are  hundred times as many microbes biomass as there are people so you know i used to think of these numbers as astronomical numbers and now i think of them as microbial numbers when you start to realize just how immense the number and mass microbes are on their planet studying life in the deep sea is about better understanding our own biosphere when eighty percent of your biosphere is deep ocean not knowing anything about it is it is is odd to me it's like living in a house where you never leave one room right and you've got a five bedroom home and you only live in one room what's really cool about life in the deep sea is that it harbors ecosystems and habitats that we just don't have here on earth there are in fact hot springs on the sea floor hydrothermal vents and in some ways are a lot like the hot springs on the land but because of the immense pressure of the ocean bearing down on them they don't boil but the temperature continues to go up so you can have water down there that's two hundred or three hundred or three hundred fifty degrees centigrade in temperature that's like your oven on self clean mode right ye living around these hydrothermal vents are really lush animal communities and microbial communities that make a living off the chemicals that come out of those vents so the deep sea is home to two of our planet's most extreme eco systems and they're extreme for very different reasons first the hydrothermal vents and many people have seen these there are these really charismatic billowing black smokers and white smokers on the sea floor which isn't really smoke but it's this really hot chemically altered water that comes out of the out of the sea floor at really high temperatures and that's one of earth's most extreme environments that's in fact where you find the hottest temperatures in our biosphere and that's in fact where you're likely going to find the most thermal tolerant organisms on the planet but animals and microbes that live there have to contend with all sorts of nasty compounds like lead and so for add arsenic and goodness knows what else and so that is definitely one extreme environment and there are likely hydrothermal vents on other moons and planets in our solar system so understanding how these work tells us something potentially about the origins of life on earth as well as the possibility of other communities living on other planets far away from our own now on the other end of the spectrum another extreme environment  is the deep subsurface biosphere and when i talk about the deep subsurface biosphere i talk about the area of the volume of sediment and rock underneath the sea floor where they are faced with the most extreme temperatures but they face a different kind of challenge those environments are probably some of the most energy limited environments in our biosphere the microbes that live down there don't have access to a lot of fresh food and they are probably living at the very edge of of starvation if you will it doesn't mean that they're suffering or this is a tough environment for them but it does mean that they've  ability to live on very low amounts of energy and we're just beginning to explore those habitats so there we are in the deep sea with these two extremes this really hot caustic dynamic environment where there's plenty of energy but it's rough to make a living and this other very cool very low energy environment where it's hard to make a living because there's just not a lot not a lot to eat when we look at microbes living in those environments we find that they've evolved some incredibly extraordinary abilities one of my favorites is the ability for microbes to make electricity now all life on earth harness is energy from the movement of electrons and you can think of those electrons in the same way that you think of a river or a stream flowing downhill that might turn a paddle wheel at a grist mill right you know that the movement of that water can turn a wheel and that wheel can do work well in our bodies we eat food in there and it tends to have a lot of electrons and we take those electrons and we move them through our biochemical pathways to oxygen which really likes electrons you can kind think of it as an electron magnet and it's the movement of those electrons from our food to oxygen that allows our body to regenerate our energy molecules or a t p it's like the energy currency so that's what we do right and that's in fact what every animal on earth does so the way you generate energy is actually not that different than a goldfish or newt or a giraffe or a lion right so at the end of the day all animals have this are pretty much stuck with this we've got to eat stuff we have to use oxygen microbes are totally different ballgame and there are microbes that can eat stuff say a sugar and take those same electrons and instead of using oxygen as their electron magnet or their electronic sector they can actually use solid materials that want to elect runs a good example is rust there are microbes that literally breathe rust so the it would be like you eating a cheeseburger and touching your hand to an iron plates and using that in lieu of oxygen so that's what microbes can do and it helps them make a living in these extreme environments like hydrothermal vents where these vent chimneys are in fact semi metallic conductive structures and microbes can grow inside and they can be an electrical contact with oxygen that's somewhere far far away right for them anyway so it's an amazing thing that these microbes evolved that allows them to harness energy in in these really challenging environments but what's really exciting is that for the last fifteen years or so scientists have worked hard on figuring out how can we use these electricity producing microbes for cleaner and more sustainable biotech now some people are looking at these to produce biofuels which is a really exciting prospect of being able to feed a microbe electricity from a solar panel and having it produce a liquid fuel i mean that's my blowing to me and on the other end of the spectrum what seems a little more earthy or rudimentary but is incredibly important is can we put these electrodes in sewage treatment plants and give them an opportunity these electricity producing microbes to breakdown the steward and use those electrodes to help them be more active and break down the sewage more quickly so the idea would be that if microbes can breathe rust as i mentioned and use that to break down sugars can you give these electricity producing microbes a chance to break down sewage and the way we would do that is we would take up an electrode that we would trick the microbes into thinking was rust or something like rust then the microbes would grow on that electrode and they would break down the organic matter in the sewage and use that electrode to breathe and sewage treatment is a really big deal right as unglamorous as it may be and trying to get oxygen to those microbes down in the sewage sludge or other kinds of of of electron magnets if you will that's really hard but sticking electrodes in sewage and growing those those microbes and enabling them to more quickly break down the sewage that's a really exciting thought and so there's a lot of research going into understanding these electricity producing microbes and this physiological process of theirs that we call extra cellular electron transfer or e t and the opportunities really run the gamut from producing biofuels by giving them electricity from a solar panel all the way to helping us clean up our waste more efficiently and in the meantime harnessing a bit of electricity from that so the beauty of basic research is that we go into the natural world and in my case the deep sea and we look around and we ask questions and we develop apotheosis and half the time were proven wrong and the other half the time we're studying we see something with even they didn't even expect it's a wondrous opportunity for exploration but as we make discoveries and ask questions and kind of do the experiments that help us better understand what these organisms  doing all sorts of applications become apparent that we may not have thought it twenty years ago i don't think any it would have occurred anybody to stick an electrode in sewage sludge and expect anything to happen because microbes would grow on it and use it to breathe and break down organic matter and here we are today trying to figure out how to make that economically viable so that's the beauty of doing pure basic research is we go in with our eyes open and hopefully our minds open as well and we come out with ideas and innovations that we just frankly couldn't predict and so in my lab we've played a part in this research on the microbes are  extracellular electron transfer in microbes and looking at the production of biofuels by feeding microbes electricity and it's been very exciting so one of the things that that i'm interested in doing is trying to figure out how can we use these electricity producing microbes to enable us to do more research in the deep sea there are no extension cords that we run to the sea floor there's no gas station or solar panels right it's a very remote environment and what we have been developing over the last few years are systems that we deploy in the deep ocean on deep sea sediments and hydrothermal vents that literally harness the electricity from the microbes that live there and we're using those systems to run sensors that tell us something about what the whole microbial community is doing so it's a very cool and exciting way of using the electricity that microbes produce to facilitate our research now at the same time we're working with companies here in massachusetts to commercialize this technology because the cool thing about these microbial energy systems which we call microbial fuel cells is in the oil and gas and telecommunications to help them deploy systems that don't ever run out of power one of the issues that came out of the deepwater horizon accident was that there weren't enough backups and part of that came down to the fact that they had battery backups that ran out of electricity so even the thought of using these electricity producing microbial systems or microbial fuel cells to trickle charge batteries is really appealing because if we can generate electricity in the deep ocean and on the sea floor and use them to monitor humankind's activities then we really have a better chance of keeping bad things from happening so once again our peer research into studying what these microbes do and finding that microbes that live in hydrothermal vents produce a lot of electricity and microbes that live in marine sediments produce a lot of electricity has enabled us to move forward with applications that we just never would have fixed never could have predicted just a few years ago in trying to understand these microbes that produce electricity we've looked for them in a lot of different environments and to our great surprise these specific kinds of microbes that produce electricity are seemingly everywhere we have we found them in coastal sediments we found them in the dirt in my backyard and forest leaf litter i mean just about anywhere where oxygen becomes limiting we find these microbes there and the reason is it gives them an advantage in those oxygen remaining environments if you don't have oxygen to breathe but you have the capability to breed something solid like rust or a naturally occurring mineral that  can accept those electrons that's a that's a good deal so it turns out that there are there seemingly ubiquitous one of the most exciting things about studying the microbes in animals that live one hundred from events is getting to see the way in which microbes interact with the animals as well is the way in which the microbes in the animals interact with the rocks you know we so often think  rocks and mineral deposits and soils beneath our feet is just something we can walk on there just as a service substrate but in fact that's not at all the case and microbes have a really intimate relationship with the minerals on our planet they they  form many of them they break down many others and certainly how does the events the microbes play a key role in the formation of some of the mineral deposits we see there they also play a key role in detox of flying the interesting very complicated but an amazing example of the way in which microbes influence the environment around them by changing the mineral composition or the  composition and in turn how the kinds of minerals and fluids that are found in the environment influenced the growth of other microbes or the animals being a deep sea biologist means that you're half biologists and half because of the complexity and the challenge in reproducing hydrothermal vents on a ship or on land we develop a lot of tools to go down and study these processes in nature do as we might call it but there are times where we really need the controlled conditions of a laboratory and to that end we we make artificial hydrothermal vents systems and that's something that even being a card carrying biologists you know i i have learned over the years how to build and design these apparatus is something i've frankly always loved doing so i've always been a bit of a want to be engineer and i have an opportunity now to do that and so we end up building systems that look a lot like what you see here and you can see how this very the large piece of equipment is quite complicated and it takes all of this to recreate the conditions we see events so for example advantage is hot right and could be two or three hundred degrees celsius but you need pressure be keep it from boiling so here we have a heating jacket that fits over this this is in fact the reactor in which we have the my fluid on the microbes and we can heat it but we have to pressurize it so we'll have big pressure problems that will use to pump water in here at high pressure so it doesn't boil then it's  turbulent they're mixing so we have to have a big motor up here in a motor controller that allows us to mix the fluid then on top of that we have to change the chemistry so we have these different valves here that allow us to introduce different kinds of chemicals and we have a temperature probe to tell us what the temperature is and then we sometimes need to make observations of the microbes while they're growing in there so we have these specially made sapphire windows that allow us to actually shine  microscope be like a laser beam inside here and use a microscope to look at the changes in the chemicals so it takes all of this to make a hydrothermal vent that's this big here in the laboratory but these tools allow us to study very specific processes and relationships among microbes and the minerals that they form and they produce and the minerals that they consume from the things we do in my lab to help us better understand what microbes are doing in our world is buil tools to make measurements that tell us something about their activity one of the most powerful tools for making measurements our mass spectrometers mass spectrometers allow you to measure changes in chemical composition and a very wide range of different kinds of chemicals and they are incredibly sensitive and they're a very important element and an analytical laboratory about ten years ago i decided that one of the things that we really need to do is build a mass spectrometer that we can take into the deep sea and make these chemical measurements and the idea is that if we go down into the deep ocean we collect samples of microbes we can see who's there and maybe even what genes are being turned on and proteins are being made but we can't actually tell you what they're doing we can't measure u a rate of methane production or a rate of oxygen utilization now if we go down and we collect a sample and we try to preserve it for those chemical measurements that's great and if it works but it's often really hard and very expensive we can spend fifteen to twenty to twenty five thousand dollars to make a single sample vessel for one measurement so if i want to go down and make five measurements on a cruise i need five vessels that are twenty and this allows us to go down and using a submarine like the alvin or an r o v e both of which we use in my laboratory to do our research that allows us to take this down and put it on the vehicle and use the manipulator arm to make precise chemical measurements on the sea floor now it can measure the concentration of dissolved gases that's what this mass spec is designed to do so we can measure oxygen or nitrogen carbon dioxide from microbes gases like hydrogen sulfide and methane and hydrogen are really important and we can measure all of those and we can get the data back in real time while we're sitting on the ship with the robots or while we're in the submarine like albon and we can look at those data and make informed decisions about where we want to take our samples so it's a really amazing tool that allows us to make these measurements in real time now there are two other things i'd like to share and that is i mentioned those those sampling bottles costing between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars well this entire instrument cost between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars for the instrument you see in front of you and the housing has different cost depending on where you want to go but with this one instrument we can make hundreds if not thousands of measurements on a single die and we often come back from an expedition with five hundred thousand geochemical measurements made and that allows us to better understand the activity of the microbes that we've sampled on the sea floor having this instrument allows us to make those measurements in real time and to do our sampling more intelligently and it's important to remember that not all vents and not all seeps and not all marine sediment is the same there is a lot of variation  just within a few centimeters of one another and so we've historically been hindered by our inability to look at that finer scale variation it's important to remember that microbes again are about a micro length and so if i take a sample from one point and i move a meter away that is an absurd distance for a microbe right that is a completely different universe it's is imagine an you know a race of giant aliens coming to earth and they grab this sample of boston right with their hands and just grounded to ground us all up and said this is what humans look like it's unlikely that that would be fully representative of the diversity of all human certainly not the diversity of our environments right so in the same way when we study microbes we really have to get to the point where we're studying at the appropriate scale both in time and using tools like this and developing tools like this allows us to go down there and make more precise measurements that are more ecologically rel