sponsoring and setting up this series and now the next thing is we're very pleased to introduce tonight speaker pretty peter gurgis professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at harvard university gergis received his ph d from u c santa barbara and he joined the harvard faculty in two thousand and five he is one of the pioneers in the discovery and the study of organisms associated with the deep sea ocean vents and his expertise on these extraordinary life forms which were a surprise at first is now being applied in a collaborative project on a large one to the ecology physiology and bio geo chemistry we will hear how his knowledge of life in the extreme deep sea environment informs the search for life beyond earth investigation of deep sea life is complicated by extreme pressure and darkness of the deep sea and dr gergis and his colleagues have developed special techniques and instruments for these exploration that are themselves very interesting and i'm hoping he'll tell us something about the inventor side of the science tonight as well we are very honored to welcome peter go i hope by the end of our time together tonight you'll have a sense of how we oceanographers and marine scientists are laying the groundwork for study of ocean upon planetary bodies but before we go down that road let me tell you a little bit if i may about the way my members and i view the world we consider ourselves physiologist and geochemists studying microbes and animals in the deep sea so what we're really interested in understanding is in the perhaps a scholarly way of phrasing it is we really care about matter and energy flow through  ecosystem another way of saying that is all living organisms have to harness life from their environment and in so doing they change the environments those of us sitting in this room here are breathing oxygen and we're using it and we're increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in this room and probably water vapor and our own human physiological act physiological activity really does you know change to an extent the conditions in this room now in nature the w organisms change the environment around them influences the other organisms that live around them and in my lab we care a lot about those relationships who's doing what when we go to a deep sea environment what microbe is responsible for making methane or eating methane or chewing up the waste products of the animals that live there what are the partnerships that exist between microbes and animals that's a big part of the research in my lab is thinking about those s relationship and finally how do we do a better job of quantifying the role that living organisms play in shaping their own biosphere we always think about the biosphere is the place in which we live right  this beautiful beautiful habitable earth of ours is our home but in turn human beings excessive activities aside all living organisms do shape their biosphere and it and that that richness of organisms influencing one another and influencing the environment around them and in turn being influenced by the environment is really what we care a lot about so with that sort of preamble i wanted to dive in and tell you a little bit more about what we do now after centuries of oceanographic research i think it tickles me that arthur c clarke summed up  my feelings about our planet how inappropriate it is to call it earth when it's clearly ocean as a deep sea biologist i feel compelled to share a few things with you the deep sea is defined as the ocean that's below a thousand meters water depth it's about a kilometer a half mile down and that's the limit to which sunlight can penetrate below a thousand meters there is no sunlight it is  land land an ocean of perpetual darkness except of course for the little organisms that make their own life but it is also a cold place that is not just dark and cold but the pressures can get immense for every ten meters you go underwater you increase the pressure by one atmosphere in this room we have roughly one atmosphere of pressure on us right and so you can imagine at  meters water depth you have to atmospheres at twenty meters you have three and so on and in the deepest part of our ocean when you get down you know you know to to the say the challenger deep in the marianas trench you're really talking about pressures close to eight thousand pounds per square inch or another way of putting this is if i counted up all the square inches on any one of you in this room and i said ok for each square inch on your body there's eight thousand pounds and i just did some simple math that would give me some large mass and it's about the weight of fifty jumbo jets gives you a sense of the immense pressures that exist in the deepest part of our ocean now the average depth of the deep seas about four thousand meters or four about two and a half miles right and that is these large expansive areas called the basal planes that are really really food poor because there isn't sunlight down there they live off of the matter that floats down from above but in addition to that sort of biological scape the deep ocean also harbors the world's longest mountain chain it's the mid ocean ridge system if you look at a map of the earth it looks like when you see the mid ocean ridge it looks like the seams on a baseball and it is the sixty five thousand kilometer long mountain range that harbors anywhere from seventy five to ninety percent of all the volcanic activity on earth so that means at least minimum for every one volcanic eruption on land there are three that occur under water now the ocean is a large expanse of water and it has many many elements in it including gold and one of my favorite trivia questions to ask of you my dear audience is if i could get all of the dissolved gold out of the ocean and give gold to each person on earth how much gold would each person have in mind i take a guess an ounce person on earth and that's for an element that's actually exceedingly rare right and so you know sometimes when i say this there's the occasional entrepreneurial student in the audience who gets really excited and i just ask them to remember you know we po scientists when that they go out make their millions but but the deep sea before we biologists most importantly represents eighty percent of our planet's living space think about this for a second every other ecosystem you can think of from deserts to rain forests tundras cities your own home everything else occupies twenty percent of our planet's habitable living space all of them combined eighty percent is the deep sea a world that is completely foreign to us at least intuitively we don't tend to think of our world as being wet cold dark and under immense pressure and salty that's not how we think but that is the predominant part of our planet's biosphere now the ocean also harbors an enormous microbial community and over recent years as we began to study these microbes we began to realize there's about ten to the twenty seventh microbes in our ocean that's just sort of some ridiculous number and that if you were to take that ten to the twenty seventh microbes and string them out and on end like so many pearls on a necklace they would span ten to the twenty first meters another big number but what does that mean that's one hundred five thousand light years that means if i could take all the microbes in our world's ocean and put them on a string of pearls excuse me like like a put them out stretch them out like a string of pearls they would cross our milky way when i first did this i thought that you know they might go from here to i don't know jupiter or i don't know the nearest star so for me as i've studied might marine microbes more and more and start to think about these numbers i no longer think of big numbers as astronomical numbers i think of them as microbial numbers so it's a real mind bender we know there's a lot of them but we really know so little about what they do honest to goodness even with all the genomic sequencing we've been up to our understanding of what these microbes are doing in nature is still in its infancy we know they run our planet we know through geochemical assessments that half the oxygen you breathe comes from marine microbes so every breath that you're taking in this room half the oxygen in that breath is not from trees it's from marine organisms the nitrogen on our planet you know the we all get excited about our protein diets and all that jazz all that nitrogen comes from microbes that are turning the nitrogen gas in the air which you cannot use or turning it into bio available doctrine right that's something that they do that we can't they interact with the animals and the minerals on our planet and they really shaped the shape our entire biosphere from the from from the most common living spaces to the very e own so what i want to do today is share with you a couple of stories and i'm going to start with some of our research here in the deep sea and i want to tell you about how microbes have done something  i think rather extraordinary they they act as a link between what happens in the deep subsurface and i mean in the mantle and in magma microbes act as a link between that and what some deep sea animal communities are doing on our ocean floor and i want to use that to give you an idea about how we go about studying these relationships and then i'm going to switch gears and tell you a bit about how we ocean scientists are working collaborative astrobiologists now to think about how we use these tools to study about how we use these tools to study life that may exist in oceans in our solar system and beyond so let's start with just blowing black billowing smoke underwater these were first discovered in one nine hundred seventy seven and i would argue they were the single most profound discovery of the twentieth century completely reshape the way we think about life on earth because we saw communities organisms living down there that do not directly depend on the sun and that was a very revolutionary realization that there are microbes that could achieve high  densities and they could care less if the sun was extinguished or not so it's a very different ecosystem than we're used to thinking now of course the animals that live there still need oxygen like you and me and that's a product of photosynthesis but it's those microbes that go thinking about how these vents might be analogs for life elsewhere so let me tell you a little bit about these vents so some of you in this room are about my age others are a little maybe more seasoned to shall we say and for some of you you may be familiar with the coffee percolator although i kind of gather that this is a hip new thing to bring back the coffee percolator for those of you who have never heard of or used a coffee percolator it's basically a pot you boil some water in it that water goes shooting up  a steel tube and it comes jetting up as hot water and steam into a basket of coffee grounds and drips through there and gives you this dark horrible brew but that's my experience with coffee percolators now vents are not that different our ocean floor has cracks in it just like our continent and those cracks allow seawater to seep into them and believe it or not there's actually an aqua for in the ocean crust a weird way to think about it right we have aqua firs on land doesn't bother us but when you think about an aco from the sea floor you know that seems a bit odd but but it's true sea water seeps into these cracks through the crust and areas of the sea floor where there is higher heat due to molten rock you know or magma or what we might call you know a magma chamber  say ten kilometers down right that heats the rock around that and as the water moves through those cracks through that hot rock it gets chemically changed all the oxygen is stripped out a lot of the other compounds are stripped out and it becomes  hydrogen sulfide and metals that dissolve in leach out of the rock it's ph or it's acidity goes down and it becomes this hot acidic water and you can imagine as hot water it is now less dense than the cold water all around it so it begins to move up through cracks in the sea floor until it escapes the sea floor as a smoker and that smoke you see isn't smoke at all it's hot metal rich water that cools quickly when it hits the deep ocean water and dumps all of its dissolved metals as little black particles that's what that smoke is that's how hydrothermal vents work now these vent ecosystems as i mentioned are dominated by extraordinary life forms and some of the largest animal communities are animals that are symbiotic with microbes there's a few different kinds there's a charismatic tube worms which you may have seen you know in any number of documentaries and there's some other communities lately we've been studying these snails that are the equivalent of the tube worms but they live in the western pacific the southwestern pacific which means in the waters off of the kingdom of tonga and fiji and some are both of these organisms have no guts or a very reduced gut the tumour has no got no mouth no gut no anus doesn't anything what it does is as a juvenile when it has a mouth as it finds its bacteria somehow  ingests it without killing it somehow and metamorphoses and it has to worm that stuck on the sea floor and then it uses this frilly red part or its plume to take up chemicals from the surrounding water  that's what it does this nails do the same thing except it harbors those bacteria and it's gill and unlike our two we're friends here the snails are our mobile they can cruise around so to tell you about these snails so  we started studying these in two thousand and nine and there's three there's two different snails and a muscle that all live down in the south pacific an area called the eastern lao spreading center and you don't need to worry about that i'm just going to call it the lao basin and again that's the area between i'll show you on a map in just a moment but this spike you sail is about the size of a somewhere between a golf ball and a softball so they're big and they've got these spikes on them that we're still trying to figure out what they do but as i mentioned they and they convert carbon dioxide into sugars that we're comfortable with this idea that plants you know make sugars and they use the energy from the sun well in the deep ocean there is no sunlight but these symbiotes use the energy in the chemicals they suck up those chemicals and they they harness the energy from chemical reactions and they convert carbon dioxide into sugars so these animals it's like having their own little farm that they grow inside their bodies right and they support them by bringing those chemicals into their gills now this is alpha conca this is from area it's a this snail amuses me to no end because we it's we go to great lengths to keep all these things alive and on occasion you know if some of our high pressure aquaria fail or something goes wrong it will lose some animals it will feel bad but we don't actually know how to kill it from area it's a little eerie like i worry that maybe if we release wanted to ask a simple question at least it started off as a simple question we said we want to know if in this is the lao basin here this is a three hundred kilometer stretch of  fields names kill them on a toll cam a if the snails living in here right had symbiotes that were using sulfide which is what we have long believed all of these symbiotes do how in the world do they compete for it like who wins if you've got alvin a conqueror there and if from area and this muscle and all of their symbiotes you s someone you would think that over evolutionary time one of them would get better at doing it than the others and there would be some degree of competition or or maybe they're not competing like this is a very fundamental question for ecologists and we frankly didn't have the answer ok all we can you know harness the energy from the reaction and produce sugars from the carbon dioxide they also take up and everyone's happy that's what we knew but we were trying to get at this question well this is alvin a cock a better at this than a from mary and so on but before we started asking about those relationships among these species we just first wanted to make sure that all of our alvin and kancha at these different vent fields were doing what we thought they were doing now this work was led by a student named roxy byner who's formally a d in my lap she's now a professor at university of rhode island and she very wisely said peter for going to go out there and we're going to collect two hundred eighty eight snails let's just make sure that when they all have the symbiote we think they do over because she noticed in the indian ocean there were some of these alvin cock with a different kind of symbol am i right simple enough now here's what we find we take all two hundred eighty eight samples and we start extract ing we bring them on board ship we started tracking d n a to look at the host in th and while we are collecting them just so you know we were making all sorts of chemical measurements around them and grabbing rock samples and trying to get the context what's the context where these snails from what's the temperature they're living in what's the chemistry they're experiencing so we take these two hundred we were taking a shorthand approach where we could do p c r with very specific chemicals and it would tell us if it was a gamma ray symbiotes right a screening tool think of it is like d n a feigning fingerprinting not so different from that wow in one place we have one species of snail that has three different kinds of symbiote that's already cool how does that work which symbiotic wins do they live together we don't have all the data we're still on board ship and we're out there trying not to throw up and at the same time being super excited by mama humpback whales with their babies you know swimming out in the water because tong is where they breed so you can imagine a lot's going on but we get these data and we're like ok well let's keep going with our work and see where this leads us right we also found once we came back home that there's not one there's three species of snail and at this point we thought things got easy three symbiotes three s slam dunk you know they form pairs and we're done and for evolutionary biologists this is really interesting like you've got three different species there in the same genus they're all alpha and conquer but there's three different species how do they figure out which they want and so on and so forth when we started looking at the distribution of where these three different species of snail were found it looks something like this the bigger the white blob means there's more of them at that than site all right well what drives that and our first thought was advents maybe there's no way for these larva to get from one vent to the other right and so maybe they're just spatially separated but our own data refutes that right our own data shows us here that is everywhere so it's not likely that they can't get around all right now bear with me because this is where it gets a little weird and a little complicated and then i hope you'll begin to see how this all ties together so then we started to ask ourselves which symbiotic partners was which snail by the way at this point in the research i'm not sure i cared because i was getting dizzy and roxie and i are like well you know living in your gills and you if you're getting something beneficial from that symbiote you want to keep it around but if it's a dead beat you probably want to get rid of it and there's lots of evidence for this in nature so we're trying to figure out how does this work and of course stronger i can partner with through these for that it gets even weirder because some straw man i actually seem to have a steady balance of the two of those and i'm going to tell you in advance we still don't understand the study balance  now let me see if i can clear this all up at this point we were you know roxie you and i were beating our heads trying to figure out well what what is this all about we've got certain kinds of snails living up here and certain kinds down here and certain kinds here and they partner with different kinds of symbiotes and what does all this mean it's not the barriers to dispersal we ruled that out it's not that the snails have a physiological tolerance like you know strong mariah's much better dealing with something down here the vents aren't that different but they are different in one major way the vents at the north if you look at the rocks the rocks are called basalt if you look at the vents at the south the rocks are called and a site and a site is a silica rich  mineral and they don't need to know anything more than that other than the fact that they're different and when you heat these up and you pump water through them the chemical reactions that take place between the water in the rock are differen basalts in the presence of the water makes a lot of hydrogen gas remember that because that is the secret to this whole story when we took our geochemical sensors and we went down and we looked at the differences  hydrogen concentrations from north to south there's a wallop load more hydrogen up in the north and hydrogen from microbes by the way is like that's like a delicacy because hydrogen is so energy rich right we know that we you know everybody invokes all the could happen in the hindu burg and i mean hydra has got a lot of energy in it so these vents naturally make hydrogen gas and i want to be clear here some microbes can use that hydrogen not all of them but some of them can they can harness the energy from hydrogen and for the microbes that can do that hydrogen in the environment is just gangbusters that's what she wants ok so as it turns out when we look at bush eddy this snail any time it has an e or an epsilon symbiotes it's found in highest abundance here where the hydrogen is highest and these snails they're these gammas cannot use hydrogen they can only use sulfide and so the whole secret to this this this pattern here is that the vent chemistry enables certain snail symbiotic combinations to do very well so if you're a snail and you can have a symbiotic the epsilon kind it can use hydrogen you're going to get a wallop load of energy from your symbiote if you live up here and kill him or want to or tokyo because there's plenty of hydrogen dissolved in the water down here there's not a lot and that free living microbes eat it and it gets oxidized i could it slippery hydrogen so you need a lot of it to be around for it to be advantageous but that's precisely what happens is that when we look at the hydrogen concentrations they're much higher up north than they are down south and what does all this mean here's the scientific babble for what this means the patterns we see imply habitat partitioning by species according to the specificity for symbiote type so let me turn that in the english because i barely understand competition within the same genus is something that ecologist think about all the time and if there's a way to alleviate it that's a great thing and what we see here is that some of these alvin a conca seem to be really good at partnering with these epsilon and they can't partner with the gammas very well at all they're predominately partnering with the e type or epsilon symbiotes and they live in the northernmost vents where there's enough hydrogen from the water rock reactions in the south south where there isn't enough hydrogen some of these other cells partner would different kinds of symbiotes the gamma and the gamma b and they live in areas where sulfide is present and there isn't enough hydrogen now i'm not going to belabor you with the differences but even they show their differences they use different flavors of that hydrogen sulfide so even they don't compete with one another now i'm sitting here all excited about this and you're probably wondering why is this a big deal well i'll give you the punchline now and i'll show you a little bit more data and we'll come back to the punchline the punchline is this this is one of the few times where we where we have shown that a symbiotic can influence the distribution of an animal based on what that symbiote can do and add to it this is the only time we've shown that the symbiotic is being influenced by abiotic geological processes that are taking place beyond the life you know there's no life down in the magma but you've got this really hot magma melt creating the you know where you have these different sea floor compositions because of that create differences in the fluid chemistry that influence the ecology of these little snails so the mantle processes in the mantle are influencing what this mollusk is doing that's crazy but if anything it underscores the relationships here on earth that exist among living organisms and our planet's biosphere even the mantle like even the mantle right so that's what got us excited about this and it's this really elegant story of how these microbes stitch everything together because they're the ones who can use the gases that come out of this water that's produced on the deep subsurface where basalt and to fight you know interact with hot water and they're the ones who can use the hydrogen of the sulfide and they're the ones that partner with the snails so that's the story here but i want to share one little fun other aspect of this of our work and that is we will you know tell showing you that they are an epsilon or a gamma kind of symbiote doesn't actually prove to us that they're making the proteins and enzymes that do that work so this is one of the most ridiculous things we have invented in our lab the idea was we wanted to be able to preserve the proteins on the sea floor and the genes that they produce write this sort of the gene copies the so called message r n a and if i take that snail and i throw it on my submarine and bring it to the surface and i get the proteins of the genes out on board ship you know what those proteins and genes tell me they tell me that that was a crappy ride from the sea floor to the ship that's what they're going to tell me so if i extract them i'm looking at a snail that's under a lot of duress and really unhappy it doesn't tell me what the conditions are like on the sea floor so we thought we have to blend them we've got to blend these underwater an underwater blender and so this is in fact what you're looking at we used hydraulic  motors which we hooked up to the submarine and they spun these little you know blender blades around really fast and we could take this lid off which is magnetically latched and drop a stale in there and blend it now want to be clear we're not doing this to be evil you know or masochistic or whatever it may be but it's not masochism we're not doing it to be evil but how we are basket case that that's a whole different conversation all different lecture but what we what we are doing is trying to get at that pattern of gene expression so i'm just going to show you a fun video to give you a sense of how this work but also how hard this is to do underwater these are giant robot arms that are incredibly clumsy i mean it's amazing what we can do right to look how clumsy this is you know so we drop snail in there the lid goes on it gets magnetically latched and then we blend right so this is how we look at these patterns of gene expression and in the interest of time here because i want to definitely tell you about our about our  our other work essentially what we got out of it was what we had initially hypothesize we found that the proteins being made by the epsilon symbiotes are using hydrogen so that explains why any stales with an epsilon semi on our most abundant up here they're doing fantastic because there's plenty of hydrogen and down here these two different gammas are using the hydrogen sulfide also in the vent fluids right but there's not a lot of hydrogen so they do great down here right and they they use hydrogen sulfide a little bit differently from one another but it's really cool so that little blender approach allowed us to literally you know corroborate and demonstrate what we had hypothesized from the earlier data so this this is what i was getting at this is this mental to microbe to mollusks right this idea that process is that happened in the magma chamber you got a magma diapers her here we've got these shallow magma chambers by shallow i mean you know maybe ten kilometers and that seawater moves through here and gets cooked under here and depending on the composition of the crust the resulting gases end up being different and that influences the symbiote which influences the snails that's pretty wild and that's why we're so excited now this is how we try and understand the relationship between rocks and water and animals and microbes on earth and most of you are here because probably on here about this right there's a lot of interest in extending the search for life beyond earth and there are these have oceans of one kind or another and astrobiologists and oceanographers are now working together to try and figure out how do you search for life there here on earth we've come up with these kinds of definitions i think many of you have heard these before you probably came up with them on your own in many ways right living things need to take energy they get rid of waste they they grow and develop they can respond to their environment they can reproduce and they evolve and this is a great reasonable list of how you might describe life right but how do you test this beyond earth like on earth i can take something and put it in an aquarium and see if i get two of them you know guppies for example as my kids will tell you right to guppies of tao turned into a ridiculous number of guppies and that's consistent with them being alive but if we're going to go study life on another planet or another moon we're not necessarily going to be bringing it back and trying to grow it here for a whole bunch of reasons people are very cautious about contamination in both directions not that we assume that they're going to be evil microbes we just don't know what's going to happen so we want to go and be able to study life without bringing samples back and doing the things we normally do see astrobiologists have basically used to testicle models to ask themselves and simulations to ask what's the probability of life right so here's sort of what's called the basie and framework for exoplanet life detection this is the possibility that there are other planets out there overdoing other suns and they can you know there's a whole bunch of different variables here what's the distribution of the biochemical states you know these are the sorts this is the posterity or sort of probability what's the frequency of biological innovation and all these different attributes and this is fine but it's a model and so where we're headed now as a community of oceanographers and astrobiologists is to say are there agnostic more agnostic chemical bio signatures for life let's go and see if we can find a fingerprints rather than make a statistical gas and rather than trying to keep something alive is there something that's diagnostic of life now let me give you an example some colleagues of mine have been thinking about the complexity of chemicals at what point when you look at chemical complexity as you start stringing molecules together at what point do you go from biological or from abiotic to something that life has to make so i give an example glucose right you've got six carbons that form a ring in you know some hydrogen and oxygen all right well y that can be formed abiotically that's not a problem we have things like you know dollar dechen dollar so on and so any number of these alcohols can also be formed a biologically but what's really interesting is when you get to a molecule that is about that has fifteen a string of fifteen carbons or fifteen you know any other elements then there's very little evidence for that occurring abiotically does that make sense so that there's a certain degree of chemical compact complexity that seems to be diagnostic of life and so this is one approach let's go and let's just look at how complex some random chemicals are and here on earth when you do it works extraordinarily well right so i can take something that was alive you know like a can of peas and still see a lot of complex molecules and i can go out in the nature and i can see by biology's chemical fingerprint there are other things that in my lab in particular we've realised we've learned that microbes produce or own electro chemical signals if i take an electrode right let's say a graphite rod and i go stick it out in some mud and i start putting potential on it right and electrical potential right or sending  let's look at it this way is less a send occurrence down it's if an organism is interacting with that it has a very particular set of attributes so if i do this on soil that's been sterilized it actually looks different than soil that has lived microbes that's pretty cool and i haven't grown or cultured or tried to do anything all i've done is gone and i've sent to the electrical charge into the soil so this is where we're at in trying to think of how do we measure these chemical signatures and so there's a whole suite of tools for mass spectrometers to isotope analyzers to these so called bioelectrical bio electro chemical systems that we work in my lab some people call them microbial fuel cells when they use them to try to harness energy from microbes same concept but a whole bunch of different tools that allow us to ask these questions and look for these agnostic chemical bio signature that really are an agnostic by a gnostic i mean they don't need a cell to defied t just going to tell you if there's something potentially living there or not we also have a bunch of new tools in ocean sciences that are allowing us to study our ocean with out or with little human intervention and i wanted to just you know autonomous underwater vehicles these torpedo like devices skimming through the water and collect water samples and do all sorts of crazy interesting things this is a remotely operated vehicle there are over this is a larger machine that's controlled by a human but it's controlled through a fiber that's a little thicker than a human hair and that means this makes this thing a lot more nimble our older versions of this had a big old cable that was like you know keeping your dog on a leash this makes them a lot quicker and more brisk and then even these autonomous think of these as like the internet of things for the ocean there floats that we put out there that collect a bunch of data and they come to the surface beam it to a satellite and it comes home and that's where we're at in the mine live in particular though where we're taking our tackling a very specific task and this is going to share with you for the rest of the talk we're really interested in these in these chemical signatures again the chemical signatures of life here on earth we know our deep you know we know there is life in the deep sea but what i really care about is understanding how are these organisms impacting the chemical regime or how is the changing chemical regime due to human activity impacting these organism s so change happens both naturally and thanks to our meddling but in either case we want to be able to really understand what's changing and that means making chemical measurements there are a whole bunch of different but you're stuck at one point so i've got kilowatts of power i can throw all sorts of crazy instruments on there and it's a great test bed but i have to sit there i'm not going to go and wander off so in my lab we've taken on the task of saying can we build a mobile autonomous self sustaining observatory that we can put wherever we want and let it do its thing and so we came up with this is our autonomy as bio geochemical in situ sensor system or the abyss i'm terrible acronym so i'm  really proud because i got finally got one that sounds ok but this is something that nasa funded because they wanted me in my lab group to really focus on thinking about how you make these chemical measurements in a suite of chemical sensors how do you link those data so if i'm going to stick an electrode inside of it and make a measurement maybe i can reach down there and take a sample from i'm aspect as well or how do i preserve some in the case of our ocean to bring back to studying the micro or if i'm doing this on an cell of this something similar in concept anyway what sensors work best together to give us a diagnostic fingerprint of life not one of these is going to tell you that there's life for sure period not one so you've got to put together and have them give you a repertoire of data so the abyss is cool in my opinion if i may say so because what we've tried to do is is to not reinvent the wheel so i am not a card carrying formally trained engineer and i will admit to you that this is been an incredibly sort of powerful tool and knowing i'm not an engineer but also not being afraid to try something ridiculous in the lab and knowing when to turn to engineers for help and so for those of you who have young kids who may be getting a car i would say do what my parents did right by them a crummy car what i learned from having to keep my car alive so i could go to any you know the football games and the pizza parties and all that taught me a lot about mechanical engineering electrical engineering and it's something a little cheeky but i'm saying sometimes we as biologists or chemists or scientists we may think  our not engineers we can't do it that's nonsense what's been great is that we saw these problems that we wanted to tackle and when we looked out into the commercial marketplace we realized that a lot of people had solutions to what we wanted to do and our challenge was figuring out how do i take this commercial off the shelf sensor and make it work you know two tons per square inch pressure in pitch darkness with a bunch of corrosive salt water around it right and that's actually a much less daunting challenge than trying to build your own spec you know starting with the circuit boards so a lot of what's happened in my lab is we've built underwater mass specs that we design and house and are open access to the community anybody can build them we throw out the plans you want to build one go for it we have underwater isotope analyzers that's another neat way of getting a biological fingerprints and all sorts of other underwater sensors and samplers and we've integrated many of them onto this about five foot by five foot platform that has this mast and a bunch of flotation on the top so you can imagine think of this is sort of analogous to a hot air balloon that allows provides floatation even deep deep sea we drop this thing over the side of a ship and all these chemical are programmed to do what they want to do to do what they need to do and they get to the bottom and they turn on the run now people have been doing that kind of instrumentation albeit maybe not as sophisticated for the better part of the last thirty years what's different here is we thought how can we do this and give us a degree of control and interaction that we may not have had before communicating underwater is a real bear right because you can't just use wife i and so my colleagues at  oceanographic who are on this project have developed this thing called an optical modem which allows us to use flashing lights to communicate at broadband speeds underwater so now our chemical observatory can be sent to the sea floor and using this device here it can flash a light on the top and then from our ship we can lower the other flashy flashy light on a cable and get to within one hundred meters and talk at broadband speeds wirelessly just like underwater wife i i cannot tell you how cool this is and that's like the secret sauce to this whole project because it means that i can put all these instruments on there and cameras and soon next year we're going to be putting on this manipulator a little rudimentary looking here but this will actually allow us to turn the cameras on and move the manipulator and watch the video in real time from a shift without physically touching this that is so cool and that's what really nasa wants us to do is not just the technology but then to ask when's the right time for humans to intervene when is it best for people to get in there and make decisions because robots and autonomy in machine learning are great but i'll tell you folks there are some things that people do very quickly way better than  machines and it's not crunching numbers and excel spreadsheets it's a decision making point and that's also part of what we're trying to do through this project so i want to show you this little video and i want to show you one of the coolest things here we are lowering the abyss this past summer this is off the coast of southern california and two thousand and seventeen and we just you know release the hook and as it sinks on its own because it has some weights when it gets near the bottom it releases those here we are with the robots of i'm sorry it's a little hard to see and you see a little blue light there that is the optical modem turning on now here's where it gets crazy i you know i'm afraid that will let me let me just there rake this for the picture and it's sending it through the optical modem to the r a v and we end up looking at that image of ourselves on the ship it's just it's pretty wild and here we are you know flashing and talking to one another  and i'm sorry that it was a little hard to see but afterwards if we all want to turn the lights off i can play it again and you can get a little bit of a better a better scene but we did this deployment and we had an r o b with us that allowed us to do the testing that we needed and so on but in the future in the future we don't need an r o v there all we need is a ship with one of these flashy flashy you know lights as i call them and they just talk to this lander or better yet we send in a u v to a robot that goes down sets up an optical link collects the data brings it home we look at it and we think oh cool let's change the geochemical sensor profiling let's do something different right now we're releasing the waste here and you'll see that it's on its way home it lifts up the bottom and it comes back home so this is you know this is like nasa moon landing stuff right off of los angeles where i grew up and it was a fantastic demonstration of how we can bring together these tools for ocean sciences and use them to set the stage for how we might study oceans on another so this work and the work of frankly many other oceanographers really aims to have to address these key questions you know where can organisms thrive and what are they doing and how many of them are there and so this is really the first time in the history of ocean sciences and astrobiology that we're really deeply working together there are always been the you know the ok tional kind of radical disgruntled ocean scientist who you know jump ship it goes to astrobiology or vice versa but now the two communities are really putting their heads together to solve some problems and as i mentioned here's why if you look at the size of the ocean if you took all of the water out earth and you turned it into a sphere it would be about that size and if you look at the volume of ocean on other other moons and triton and ti and ganymede i mean it's huge so this table alone gives you a sense of just how more expansive the oceans are on some of the other bodies i mean you rope a has an ocean that's larger than our own and europa is a small move right so we're going to be faced with the challenge of exploring a giant ocean and looking for these chemical signatures and i think the chemical signatures are one challenge but i think in wrapping this up the biggest challenge is this we're trying to study life over tremendous spatial scales microbes are micron or so in size our oceans are immense our planets are spread across light years we're talking nineteen orders of magnitude or more and for any of you studying a process to go like one order of magnitude is a lot but nineteen and that's one of our biggest challenges that's all and by just showing you some of the kind of open design tools that we've developed in the lab  our hope is that oceanographers around the world will adopt these for use in their labs and for their own science and science projects it's free of charge we've been supported by nasa and n s f and know it to build these tools and as far as i'm concerned you taxpayers  the bill for your tools and this open design policy has been really fruitful and fostering a lot of collaboration right with with people who have ideas on how to improve our tools so i hope gone  days of scientists kind of hoarding their own little widget in their lab because there's way too much work to do and i've just never seen the benefit of it but i hope that these kinds of tools from arm aspect here to the isotope analyzer to our you know silly little  blenders even to does the incredible little temperature sensors that we can build for about one hundred bucks that can withstand full ocean pressure there's a lot of cool things that we can do and i mentioned microbes earlier we can even build systems now which we've done recently to harness the electricity from microbes living in mud they'll make electricity if you give them the chance to put it somewhere they'll make electrical current and you can harness it and we used it to set up the world's first  microbial powered quote unquote wireless observatory and we're not powering optical modems we're sending data acoustically which is like old broad old dial up modem speeds but it's all powered by the microbes so think about that for a second here harnessing microbes to generate electricity to run sensors to study microbes and it's pretty cool but with that i'd really like to thank you for your time and i'd be happy to answer any questions you so thanks again