Secrets of the Seep is the latest WFSU Ecology documentary. Watch it on Thursday, May 8 at 8 pm/ 7 Central on WFSU-TV and online.
Here’s a short preview:
Harsh waves. Rugged terrain. A seasick crew. A school of disruptive fish.
The ocean bottom is a challenging place to study. People who conduct research here like to say that we know more about space than we do about the deep ocean; it is the most mysterious place on earth. And yet, much of what happens down there has consequences for the rest of the planet.
In Secrets of the Seep, we meet an international team of researchers working to solve one of these mysteries of the deep. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is a little-understood substance, and yet it forms the ocean’s largest carbon reservoir. The world’s largest source of organic carbon is methane contained in the sediments beneath the ocean. Where methane seeps into the water column, DOC is much older than in the rest of the ocean – but why?
Learning the answer would help explain what keeps this massive amount of carbon cycling through the world’s oceans, and mostly out of our atmosphere.
WFSU joined the research team as they set out to answer this question in August of 2023. They found the ocean uncooperative. Weather kept them from using their most sophisticated research tool: Alvin, a world famous manned submersible. Alvin’s résumé includes a trio of impressive discoveries: hydrothermal vents, methane seeps, and the wreckage of the Titanic.
After years of planning, they found they could not work at the site they had carefully chosen. How did they respond?
Secrets of the Seep is about the work that goes into researching the ocean bottom. Scientists spend years planning for those precious few days they have at sea. How can they overcome the challenges of an uncooperative environment to answer their scientific questions?
23 Researchers, 1 Research Question (with many spinoffs)
Understanding the mechanics of the global ocean carbon cycle is no small task. This project, titled SeepDOM by the team, is a collaboration between research institutions from all over the world. They include:
- Florida State University
- Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research
- MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen
- University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
- University of Tennessee
- US Geological Survey
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The institutions in bold are those of the Principal Investigators. The PIs are trying to answer the main scientific question: why is dissolved organic carbon older near methane seeps than in other parts of the ocean? And what role does that play in the global carbon cycle?
The other institutions sent PhDs and graduate students to support their primary objective. But they also have their own research related to ocean sediments, microbes, and carbon.
The team is a mix of PhDs, graduate students, technicians and undergraduate students. They worked in shifts around the clock, the entire time they were out at sea. Some of their tasks were highly technical, while others were manual. One minute they might have been in the computer lab controlling equipment hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the ocean, and the next they might have been on the deck in hardhats, pulling on chains to retrieve their gear from the water. And then there was all the mud squeezing. A lucky few went down in the Alvin.
