Funded projects

Exploring Ocean Worlds is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary project funded by NASA to bring oceanographers and planetary scientists together to understand how to observe and interpret data from ocean worlds.

Banded together: modern water-microbe-mineral feedbacks in the deep Archean lithosphere -- Interactions between microbial life, humans, and our shared environment influence essentially every aspect of daily modern life, from the treatment of medical conditions to agricultural innovations. These interactions show how successful microbial life can be under a wide variety of conditions, on short time scales, and at the Earth's surface. However, scientists also have evidence that microbial life is important over long time scales and deep underground.

Hydrothermal vents, which deposit seafloor massive sulfides (SMS), occur along the 89,000 km of mid-ocean ridges, submarine volcanoes, and backarc basins that occur at tectonic plate boundaries in the ocean. Active hydrothermal vent sulfide chimneys are hotspots of biodiversity and productivity in the deep ocean, as well as potential resources for metals.