MBARI - 2010 Southern Expedition

"It’s as nail-biting as sending a robot to Mars. Except I hope we get it back in four days." Those were my thoughts as a series of remotely operated vehicle (ROV) pilots maneuvered the 1600 kilogram Deep Environmental Sample Processor (D-ESP) onto the very pinnacle of an underwater mountain, a 1.8 by 1.8 meter semi-flat table of crust. This maneuver was handled with the deftness of a brain surgeon as these pilots deposited the D-ESP in the best place to study the effects of a naturally occurring methane seep—on the summit of a ‘pimple’ on the sea floor, over 800 meters (2600 feet) deep.

We are a team of microbiologists and engineers who have designed and built a machine, the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP), that functions as a complete microbiology laboratory in a can. The D-ESP is special, as it lives in a unique pressure housing, a 1.2 meter sphere of titanium designed by our mechanical engineer extraordinaire, Doug Pargett, to withstand the pressures of the ocean down to four kilometers deep (thus the "D" for Deep). This unique housing has people affectionately calling it the "Death Star," a fact not lost on the Los Angeles harbor patrol and police, as several slow helicopter passes over our stern yesterday in port made it clear we were being "checked out." Despite it's ominous appearance, the real function of the D-ESP is much more prosaic: it will sample water both on top of and off this mound to help researchers understand how methane-enriched waters influence both microbial function and diversity.

The day began with an uneventful cruise under gray skies to a spot due south of Malibu and due west of Torrance in southern California. The crew of the Western Flyer worked with their typical aplomb at dropping the D-ESP over the side—there is not a science deployment they haven’t seen and there is never a worry that they won't get equipment over the side and back onboard. The 1600 kilogram D-ESP, which weighs only 36 kilograms in water due to the flotation from foam and the sphere itself, took about 22 minutes to reach the bottom. We then launched the ROV and were surprised with some stunning images of the methane "mound" and some equipment from two long-term experiments left on the mound since March. Those instruments seemed to have sprouted hair everywhere. Each was covered in a fine, hair-like mat that, when seen from afar, gave them a ghost-like, other-worldly appearance. These are most likely from filamentous bacteria, but we won’t know for sure until we recover each instrument, slated for later this trip.

After getting the D-ESP situated, Bill Ussler began some incubation experiments to see the food preference of methanotrophic bacteria. "Why in the world would anyone want to know that?", you may ask. I did. But Bill patiently explained that if we know how microbes metabolize methane and hydrocarbons, this insight might be used to understand how we might harness these microbes to produce food or methanol as an energy source, much as we've harnessed microbes to manufacture insulin and other drugs.

We ended the ROV dive finding a small glitch in a critical subsystem of the D-ESP but a software work-around has been developed and will be pushed down to the ESP tomorrow. This was the only tarnish on an otherwise sterling day. The analogy we came up with was we made it through the first inning: they didn’t score, we got some people on base but fouled-out before scoring. Score is still 0-0. Inning two tomorrow.