About This Project

There is a huge gap in knowledge of deep seafloor habitats. Current methods of studying the deep seafloor require sediment collection. Given the current pressure to mine the deep sea, there is an urgent need for cost-effective tools to better profile and understand this environment. This project proposes adapting a shallow water sediment profiler to deep water -7000m- to collect images in UV-VIS-NIR of the last 10-20 thousand years of records.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

There is a serious gap in knowledge about deep-sea habitats. Deep seafloor stores carbon, a major ecological function that provides life support to the planet's biodiversity. Society is pressing to begin deep-sea mining (DSM) in international waters. The granularity of sampling (1 station every 45 sq km), and lack of time series, make it impossible to dimension the short and long-term impact of DSM. This project will not only increase the coverture of data, and increase granularity, but also provide time-integrated information—the biogeochemical profiles—needed to predict environmental impacts.

What is the significance of this project?

We are reaching a new tipping point concerning ocean acidification. There is a need to increase data (overture and number of samples) from the seafloor with a temporal component. Unless we cost-effectively improve how we assess the deep-sea habitat. There are no tools to realize this challenge on short notice. This project aims to solve this problem. We will provide a tool that will asses a time-integrated view of the biogeochemical status of the sediment-water interface of the deep seafloor.

What are the goals of the project?

To provide a device that will perform at 7000m water depth that will collect biogeochemical information of the seafloor for at least the last 15000 years.