Microbes of the Deep: Peter R. Girguis Discusses Ocean Microbial Life and Our Biosphere

Richard Jacobs: Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast.  I have Peter Girguis.  He’s a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and we’re going to talk about various issues surrounding that.  So, Peter, thanks for coming.

Peter Girguis: Well, thank you for the invitation.  It’s a pleasure to meet you.

Richard Jacobs: So, tell me about your work.  What’s the research about?

Peter Girguis: As you mentioned, I’m on the faculty here at Harvard University.  My lab really focuses on understanding how our planet’s biosphere runs, in particular the contribution of the ocean to making our planet habitable.  You and I get up in the morning and there’s oxygen in the air and the sun is shining and sometimes, there’s rain and we turn our faucets on and water comes out and all of that happens and we depend on it and we don’t often take the time, even me, even though I study this for a living, we don’t often take the time to stop and say, “Well, how did this all come to pass?”  So, in my lab, we study the microbes and animals that live in the ocean, in particular the microbes and the role that they play in keeping our planet healthy and making oxygen available.  In my lab, we primarily study microbes that interact with metals, iron, and magnesium, and things like that that are a huge part of keeping our ocean healthy, believe it or not.  They’re kind of like the multivitamins of the ocean.  Everything needs a little bit of these metals, just like we do to keep our body healthy and microbes play a huge role in making that happen.  That’s what we do.

Richard Jacobs: So, do you study the bacteria or the viruses [inaudible – 0:01:37.2] that prey upon the bacteria or all of that, or what’s your focus?

Peter Girguis: Great question.  So, we primarily study bacteria as well as organisms called Archaea, they are microbes that weren’t really recognized for a long time because when you look at a microbe under a microscope, it’s a little round dot, for the most part, some form chains and things like this but there are two different kinds of microorganisms that are really abundant in our world.  Rich, one of the things that’s hard to remember is just how many of them there are.  There are, in the ocean, about 10 to the 27^th, 10 to the power of 27, and that’s a big number.  10 to the power of 9 is a billion, 10 to the power of 12 is a trillion, 10 to the 27^th.  And there are so many of them that if we strung them end-on-end like pearls on a necklace, they would stretch across our galaxy, literally 105,000 light-years of microbes.

Now, most microbes on earth are playing some role in helping the planet run, they’re not human pathogens, there are maybe like a couple of hundred that hurt people at most.  And of the millions and billions and trillions of other microbes, they keep our planet running.  So, we study those organisms and we study the animals that associate with them.

Richard Jacobs: Well, there’s a lot of study.  I mean what is your focus?  I’m sure there are a few subject creatures or certain microbes that you study, like how do you narrow it down?

Peter Girguis: Great question.  A lot of what we focus on are those environments in the deep ocean that are putting metals and other kinds of molecules into the water.  So, those are things like hydrothermal vents, which are the underwater hot springs, as well as methane seeps.  Now, believe it or not, there are a lot of places in our ocean where methane and other gases are just naturally occurring and oil is naturally occurring and seeping out of the seafloor.  Now, these are not bad, they’re not the same as a big oil spill.  But the microbes that live there and the animals that live there are typically doing really amazing things like making a living off of these oils and off of these metals.  For example, at hydrothermal vents, there are a lot of microbes that make a living off of this molecule called Hydrogen Sulfide, which is that rotten egg smell that comes out of sewers.  And for most animals, that stuff is toxic, it’s more toxic than cyanide and yet microbes and the animals that they partner with have found the way to take that toxic chemical and use it to harness energy.  So, they actually make a living off of these chemicals almost independent of sunlight.

Richard Jacobs: What’s weird that the trading of energies held by the various bugs and molecules just like the currency of our life, it seems like it’s really weird inside of ourselves, the KREB cycle, just like an interplay of electron energies, it’s really weird.

Peter Girguis: Absolutely. So, you are asking me specifically what we focus on.  Well, those are the sites we study.  But what we specifically really care about is how matter and energy flow through our biosphere.  Now, we know and many of us have heard that matter is neither — energy is neither destroyed nor created.  Scientists who study this know this intimately but even those of us who aren’t scientists on a day-to-day basis may have heard this before.  Well, it’s true.  But what organisms do is they find ways to move energy from the world around them to harness it and to do work.  And you mentioned the Krebs cycle, so whenever we sit down and eat, we’re taking in organic matter and I don’t mean organic in the way that fancy grocery stores do.  I mean stuff that other organisms have produced and we eat it and we basically burn it with oxygen.  And that reaction yields energy that we can harness to build ourselves again, to grow our bones, to have children, to wield the hammer, you name it.  That’s how our biosphere runs.  So, a lot of what we do, Rich, is we ask what microbes are playing a role in moving matter and energy from the abiotic world, from rocks and chemicals, into the biological world.  That is the focus of our work.

Richard Jacobs: Is there a name for the bacteria or the creatures that first start with the raw material and was this successively work on it?

Peter Girguis: Well, we scientists love to give names to everything because it helps us understand and kind of categorize creatures.  Now, there we’re familiar, almost all people are, with plants and plants harness energy from the sun and they use that to convert carbon dioxide into sugars, so we would call those a photoautotroph and that’s just kind of a fancy way of saying a light self-feeding organism.  They can harness energy from light and they can make sugars to feed themselves.  The microbes that live at the bottom of the ocean and do this without sunlight, they do the same thing but they use chemical energy, hydrogen sulfide, and oxygen or other chemicals.  We call them chemoautotrophs.  So, they’re very similar to plants except they’re doing this using chemical energy.  So, the cool part about this, Rich, is that these organisms, many of them, don’t need oxygen at all.  In fact, they don’t even like oxygen.  It’s toxic to them.  It’s too aggressive and oxidant.  And they make a living by harnessing the energy from chemicals and this is cool because it’s independent of the sun and that raises the possibility that similar kinds of organisms could thrive elsewhere in our universe.  Say, for example, the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

Richard Jacobs: So, this place is where oil seeps through the floor of the ocean, what are some of the connections like, like how deep and what’s the oxygen level at the ambient water and what are some of the conditions like the pressures?

Peter Girguis: Yes. The funny thing about the deep sea is that it is defined as the ocean that’s below a 1,000 meters deep, so it’s about 3,000 feet thereabouts.  So, think about half-a-mile, ballpark.  The deep ocean below 1,000 meters does not ever experience sunlight.  That’s beyond the reach of the sun.  That’s how we define the deep ocean, right.  So, the moment you’re down to the 1,000 meters, you actually have a lot of water over you and the pressure there is a 100 atmospheres.  So, we’re used to living in 1 atmosphere, which is, let’s just say for Americans, it’s about 16 PSI.  The pressure in your car tire is probably about 2 to 3 atmospheres, 32 to 48 PSI, somewhere in there.  The animals that live down at 1,000 meters are experiencing a 100 atmospheres of pressure or about 1,600 PSI.  Most of the study sites that we work at well below 1,000 meter, so they’re about 2,000 meters.  So, there, you’re talking about over 3,000 PSI to 4,000 PSI and it’s perpetually dark, the water is typically near-freezing except form the hot water that could come out of vents but at these methane seeps, it’s ice-cold, there is generally plenty of oxygen.  That is not a big problem because it ends up coming from above and circulating into the deep ocean.  It’s about half as much in the deep ocean as there is at the surface.  But where it gets really even more challenging besides the pressure and the ice-cold temperature is at the methane seeps, the gas seeps, there is also a lot of sulfites produced by microbes in this case.  And again, that’s so concentrated that it’s toxic to a lot of animals.

So, the animals that live there are adapted to coping with that sulfite and they have evolved over time to tolerate that sulfite because it’s a great place to eat microbes.  So, if you’re grazer and you can evolve tolerance to sulfite, you have access to foodstuff that doesn’t depend on the sun and that’s pretty cool.

Richard Jacobs: What kind of bacteria you see in those areas, what kind of microscopic creates do you have, are they like shrimp or other feeders that can tolerate the sulfite?

Peter Girguis: There are a lot of animals that live in and around seeps that have evolved to live in those conditions. We do find shrimp, for example, that go down and graze on these, there are fishes, there are lots of things called the [inaudible – 0:09:59.3], that means sea stars and sea cucumbers and things like that.  What’s really cool though is recently, we have observed that some fishes that live in and around the seeps may be commercially important species.  Now, we’re just at the beginning of this study and observation but a few years back, Rich, we were doing dives off of southern California and we’ve found an area of gas seepage that is 1.5 kilometers long and 300 meters wide.  So, to give you a rough idea, that’s like about a dozen to 15 football or soccer fields.  That’s big.  And it’s one big continuous stretch of orange and yellow colored microbes.

  So, we nicknamed it the Yellow Brick Road.

Richard Jacobs: So, these are like big orange curtains.

Peter Girguis: Yes, absolutely, Rich. They look like — those who remembered the 1970s, it looked like the orange and yellow shag carpets that were so popular.  I mean that’s what it looks like.  It looks like a big old shag carpet, just a kind of orange and yellow throw rug that’s 15-football fields big.

Now, what’s really cool is we started seeing some spotted sole and that’s a particular kind of flatfish that we’re swimming into and among these microbes.  And we didn’t really know what it meant.  And my colleague Lisa Laven, who is a professor at Scribs, she and I were looking at these thinking what in the world, why are these fish swimming into here?  Now, Lisa is an [inaudible] oncologist and thinks a lot about the animals rather that live in and around these communities.  But check this out.  Why would a fish swim into a sulfidic toxic environment?  Our best guess right now is that these fishes may be doing this to get rid of parasites.  Now, if you lived in the ocean or if you lived out in the wild, you could imagine that parasites want to live in or on or around you.  We think these sole are swimming into these sulfidic waters and taking a few big gulps and pushing it through their gills may be to get rid of some of these parasites, which is cool because it’s kind of like we go to spa, a detox spa to get rid of our aches and pains and to cleanse ourselves, these fishes go into a kind of tox spa to use the sulfide to probably get rid of these parasites.  That’s pretty cool.  And it’s relevant to the $250 million fishery industry of California.

Richard Jacobs: I guess it’s better than Botox your face that will help you.

Peter Girguis: I think you’re right, better than Botox.  So, that’s kind of cool.  We’re starting to learn the relationship between these deep-sea environments and the kind of ecosystem services they provide to animals that live in the shallow waters including commercially relevant fishes.

Richard Jacobs: If you map upwards from the seafloor above a seep, at what point does the water not become toxic anymore?  How does the hydrogen sulfide disburse?  What does this look like, is it a code or [inaudible – 0:13:05.5] over the seep that’s toxic or is it going right to the surface and these fishes that normally don’t live with that environment floating us go through it?

Peter Girguis: Great question, Rich. The sulfide that comes out of these seeps forms a kind of dorm or a lens I suppose of water that’s sulfidic.  The thing about sulfide is it’s really toxic but when you put it in seawater with oxygen, it goes away pretty quickly.  So, there isn’t a whole bunch of sulfide, the toxic stuff, say 100 meters off-bottom, certainly not at a seep.  But once you get near the bottom, definitely you get to within, say, 5 meters or about 15 feet or 3 meters or about 9 feet, I bet you that fishes and other animals start to experience it.  But you raised an important question, Rich.  We don’t have a good idea yet of how matter and energy flow from the seafloor to the rest of the upper ocean.  I mentioned earlier that we really focus on understanding how this matter and energy move through our biosphere from the deep sea to the shallow sea to our dinner plates, that is not something that we have a really good understanding of.  So, we think seeps are providing food for these animals that live on the bottom.  They may provide food for other animals that live higher on the water column and so on, very likely to be the case but we’re just starting to figure it out.

Richard Jacobs: And when you say the hydrogen sulfide goes away, what happens in the sea?  Does the hydrogen sulfide break down and then fall back down into the floor of the sea?

Peter Girguis: Yes, great question. So, hydrogen sulfide is one of these molecules that we describe as being really reactive.  And it tends to react very quickly with oxygen especially in the presence of some of the trace metals we see in seawater.  Now, it doesn’t take a lot of iron or manganese or any other metals but just a little bit, just the normal concentrations and that sulfide react really fast with oxygen and it forms a molecule called Sulfates.  Now, there is a lot of sulfate in the ocean, 28 millimolar for those who are inclined to get excited about these numbers.  And the sulfide that comes out of the seep is usually a few millimolar, so it gets oxidized with oxygen and form sulfate eventually and sulfate’s generally harmless at those concentrations to the animals in the ocean because they see it all the time.  So, that’s what happens to the sulfide.  Before all of it’s oxidized the microbes have access to some of that hydrogen sulfide and if they can bring it into their bodies and use their enzymes to oxidize it in a controlled manner, they can harness the energy from the reaction to produce ATP, just like you and I do from eating a hamburger or a vege-burger or whatever we eat.  That’s what they do by accessing hydrogen sulfide.

  That’s their electron-donor or it’s their food.

Richard Jacobs: So, any sample to the seafloor near the seeps to see if there are [inaudible – 0:16:04.6] materials or you’ve looked at the chemistry to see when the hydrogen sulfide becomes sulfate, sulfide etc., where does it go then?  Does it get deposited to make its own structures or coral or where did it go?

Peter Girguis: Great question. Rich, a lot of the sulfide that ends up coming out of seeps and vents will react to form solids.  Now, let’s talk about vents for a second.  Hydrothermal vents are areas of the seafloor where seawater has percolated into the crust into an aquafer.  We’re all comfortable with aquafers on land, believe it or not, there are aquafers at the bottom of the ocean.  I mean why wouldn’t there be?  Seawater percolates into the crust, this basaltic crust, a kind of iron-rich mineral, it gets heated by a magma chamber typically, that’s a few kilometers down, and it gets cooked and chemically altered.  So, once the water is chemically changed, all the sulfate in the seawater becomes hydrogen sulfide.  It’s now warm and acidic and it now floats to the surface through the path of least resistant right through a crack in the crust.  It comes up through a crack in the crust and emerges as a hydrothermal vent.  That iron and sulfide-rich water, when it hits the ice-cold seawater, precipitates to form things called Iron sulfide, which many people know as fool’s gold and it builds the big hydrothermal vent chimneys that you may have seen on documentaries.  So, a lot of that sulfide forms big deposits on the seafloor and they’re big.  Some of these sulfides are 80 meters tall.  That’s taller than Notre Dame in Paris.  I mean these are big structures.

They’re also of commercial interests these days as people have learned that these sulfides are often enriched in gold or other metals especially rare earth elements, things like tellurium or any of the kind of lanthanides as we call them.  Those rarest elements are really important in making all the devices that we depend on and use today.  So, there is a growing conversation about whether or not we should mind these hydrothermal vents sulfide deposits because it would be a great source for these rare earth elements we use in electronics.

Richard Jacobs: So, these seeps that you’re talking about, are they punctuated by chimneys of black smokers or those in other parts of the seafloor?

Peter Girguis: So, hydrothermal vents on the seafloor are hosts to chimneys and black smokers and all those kinds of really dramatic features, the structures that are taller than Notre Dame in Paris, just big, big things or sometimes lots of little chimneys.  They look kind of like maybe a potbelly stove, we see a lot of those around vents.  The gas seeps often those have those features.  They’re usually a little more subdued but they’re areas of the seafloor that we usually spot because there is a microbial curtain or carpet sort of sitting above it, usually a few centimeters or inches thick but absolutely distinctive from the rest of the seafloor.  That’s how we typically know that there is a gas seep or methane coming out.

Richard Jacobs: Any other major features, I heard this like gigantic methane deposits, I don’t know what floor it’s on but they’re lying on the floor, on the certain spots of the ocean.  What other major features are there that you know of?

Peter Girguis: There are parts of the seafloor that have gigantic deposits of something called methane ice or methane hydrates.  Now, let me take a second and remind us all a bit about methane.  Methane is a molecule that we talk a lot about because it’s a potent greenhouse gas, much more potent than carbon dioxide.  It doesn’t persist as long in the atmosphere but it’s definitely worth paying attention to.  Methane comes out of oil and gas seeps and we’ve talked as a society about natural gas and how it’s a cleaner fuel than oil and there is truth in that.  But the methane we get out of oil and gas seeps and natural gas wells is old methane, it’s methane that was produced a long time ago.  And when we burn it, we’re exacerbating our atmosphere carbon dioxide problem.  There are many, many microbes that make so much methane from new carbon, from living carbon, bio-methane to use the jargon, that would technically be kind of more carbon-neutral.  And most of that methane is made in the seafloor.  There is so much methane that’s produced in the seafloor that it really could play a role in meeting humankind’s energy needs.

The fact of the matter is though it’s really hard to access and probably not a good idea, in my opinion.  That methane on the seafloor produced so quickly and rapidly that at the conditions on the seafloor, it forms a kind of methane ice and it looks like the ice you would put in your glass except if you took a match to it, it burns as it releases the methane.  And there is an awful lot down there and nations have been seriously considering whether or not we should be mining that as well.  But as a deep-sea scientist, I would say that the costs decidedly outweigh the benefits when it comes to methane hydrates.

Richard Jacobs: I’ve heard about mapping the seafloor but I’ve only thought about it in terms of topology, you know, here’s the deepest part etc.  Is anyone mapping the seafloor and can you somehow remotely see here’s methane hydrates, here are these vents, here are seeps?  If you did even on a small scale than on a larger scale, you might see a very different picture of the sea and you might uncover the dynamics of it by seeing all that.

Peter Girguis: Rich, I think it’s really critical that we spend a little bit more time and effort than we have on really developing good maps of the seafloor. The expedition of Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark changed the way that Americans viewed the continent of North America.  Right now, we have maps of the seafloor that come from satellites but they have about the resolution of a city block or two.  So that means if there were something the size of a house on the seafloor, you wouldn’t know it was there.  In fact, some of these maps have mountains where there are no mountains and have flat areas where there are mountains.  So, they’re not really high resolution.  We do have the tools though to go down and make higher resolution maps from ships and from underwater robotic submarines that will do precisely what you’re eluded to, further our understanding of the dynamics of the seafloor and its relationship to the upper ocean and frankly to our entire biosphere.

Now, we do have tools that can actually map these methane hydrates and map the hydrothermal vents, and interestingly, we have become, as a society, more interested and committed to making these maps, I think in part because of the awareness that they may be commercially valuable.  And I’m okay with us making these maps and asking the question, “Should we or shouldn’t we mine these”, that’s a question for society at large.  But I’m also glad that we make these maps and do deep sea surveys to see the ecosystems and to understand the microbes and frankly, understand the role in the rest of our biosphere.  If you just do maps, Rich, and you’re like, “Oh, here’s a big metal deposit” and you go mine it and do it blindly, you may be causing far more problems for those ecosystems and even humankind than you realize.  So, we got to do this well, make the maps, and do our bio surveys.

Richard Jacobs: Yes, picturing the ocean is like a sandwich now and the bottom bread is these methane hydrates and seeps and all of the other stuff, there’s activity and the top bread is the top X number of meters where the sunlight and all the other stuff and then in the middle, I guess that’s maybe the quieter part, I don’t know but the top and the bottom modulate a lot of what goes on in the sea.

Peter Girguis: It is a kind of Sandwich Ocean, isn’t it?  You have this very dynamic seafloor that we know from plate tectonics now is being recreated and consumed all the time.  I mean the seafloor grows at about the same rate that your fingernails do if not a little bit faster.  So, literally the entire seafloor is moving.  Now, the upper ocean is very familiar to us.  We see waves and storms and pelicans and swordfish and commercial fisheries and crew ships, all sorts of activities including human activities, a huge amount of our world’s commerce takes place on the open ocean, and on the high seeps.  The rest of the ocean in-between is the earth’s largest habitat.  The deep-sea is the largest biosphere on earth.  It’s about 80% of our planet’s living space.  And there is a lot of action that goes on there but it’s so big and so vast that it’s spread out.

So, think of it is as the challenge being like how do you measure these really big processes that are taking place in this giant ocean when the signal you’re looking for, let’s pretend it’s the amount of nutrients that come from the deep sea, is spread out so widely that it’s really dilute.  It’s still huge, it’s really hard to measure and we’re not good at that.  That’s why we miss a lot of the importance of this open blue water, just hard to make those measurements but it doesn’t make them any less significant, not at all.

Richard Jacobs: How big of a picture do you look at or consider when you’re considering these seeps and you’re considering the ocean and the oncology of it?  Are you zooming in and out all the time and looking at I don’t want to call it microenvironment but local environments and then the whole environment, what levels do you have to model and think and play and look in order to understand what you want to understand?

Peter Girguis: Studying the natural world around us has to take place at different temporal scales.  In other words, we need scientists who are willing to devote their lives to studying a particular species of Algae.  We also need scientists who are willing to look at the ocean through the lens of a satellite and try and understand processes at that scale and neither is more important than the other, neither one is more important than the other.  My lab is really interested in connecting the dots between some of these scales and we don’t quite go to the scale of satellites but what we really care about is asking how do microbes, which are kind of micron in size, influence their local environment on the order of meters and tens of meters and what is the connection between these areas that are tens of meters wide to other related environments that may be a few kilometers away and collectively how do those environments influence the upper ocean, which is tens and hundreds of kilometers?

Now, most of our work is on that sort of microns to meters to kilometer range.  But, Rich, when we start looking at these ecosystems on the seafloor and starting to study matter and energy flow through it, which is really best described as biogeochemistry, we start to find that deep-sea vents and seeps are really important to the rest of our ocean.  I’ll give you an example.  Colleagues of mine, not too long ago, found that iron that comes out of deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the deep, deep ocean of the pacific have an influence on the productivity of the waters off of Chile, which is one of the most productive waters in our world and a hotbed for commercial fishing.  So, again, these events are kind of like the ocean’s multi-vitamin.  They’re providing the trace metals needed for the [inaudible – 0:27:49.7] plantain in the upper ocean to grow, those plantain interns are fed-on by tiny shrimps which intern feed the bigger shrimps and thus goes the food web.  That is what we do.  I want to connect the dots so that humankind better understands the relationship between different parts of our world, in particular the ocean.  That’s my focus.

Richard Jacobs: That’s why it seems like there needs to be this mapping because I don’t know, what would it tell you if there were, on average, one seep for every 10 miles in the ocean versus one seep for every mile or 100 miles or what if there were these features that were heavily present in these parts of the ocean and then these parts of the ocean were barren and you could correlate that with the richest and the movement of fish, etc.?

Peter Girguis: That’s a great question.  You’re going to make me want to drag you into ocean science.  You’re talking about one of our biggest problems.  How does it matter if there’s one seep every kilometer versus 10 seeps every kilometer?  Those are the kinds of information that were lacking.  And what I can do, and many others can do, we do this well as a society and as a group of scientists, we can go down and study that seep and make some chemical measurements and say, “This is what’s coming out of this seep”, but at this point, without a map, really an honest map of their distribution, we don’t really know how many there are.  And thus, we’re flying blind on what their impact is, right.  And again, going back to Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark, imagine they went on their expedition and came back and they said, “There’s lots of cool stuff, we came across the yellow stone and mountain ranges and what have you but we have no idea where”, I mean that would be a little bit more information but then, we’d still be stuck wondering where exactly these features are and that’s about where we’re adding ocean sciences.  And we’re getting better, don’t misunderstand me, but we have a long way to go to have a really good base map that allows us to build on.

Richard Jacobs: Where is the place that seems to have a lot of diversity in terms of features that you can map to a very, very high degree to a one-foot resolution?  Is there an area that you can designate like that map the heck of it, look for cycling horizontally and vertically and try to make a model of this one area?

Peter Girguis: That’s a great question. Where in the ocean would we be able to do a really good integrative job of mapping at the appropriate resolution and making these sorts of linkages between the seafloor and the water column?  We’ve identified a few sites already in the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, and other nations, frankly have invested in ocean observatories where we put down infrastructure and sometimes telecommunications and power cables to build an observatory, a suite of sensors that can make the kind of chemical measurements and observations you’re talking about and that’s fine and we learn a lot.  I think that the problem is we are still trying to extrapolate understanding of the ocean from a few representative sites that we’ve studied.  There is a bit of a bias in this, Rich.  Most of these sites were chosen because we knew something about them.  It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily representative of the seafloor.  So, I think that work is important.  We got to do this and we have some good examples now and we’re just starting to make that kind of integrated measurement that you’re referring to.  We still need to go and really build a better base map for the entire ocean.

And I would say the way to do this is to focus on the exclusive economic zones of all nations.  There is every reason in the world that wealthier nations should be investing in the mapping of — actually enabling other nations to create their own maps and allowing those nations to own those maps.  The ocean does not belong to anyone but we all depend on it.  So, the more we understand about it frankly the better off humankind will be.

Richard Jacobs: What if you looked at some of the great circulating ocean currents and you sample them for composition and you ran along with one of these great circulating current I don’t know at what depth but again, kept sampling and sampling as it goes, maybe that would be an easy way to get a quick tour of what it had passed by and what it was influenced by?

Peter Girguis: Yes, there are a couple of efforts now where people are going out and mapping the great ocean currents both with an eye towards understanding its chemistry as well as its biology.  And so, there are some really amazing efforts worldwide to look at microbial communities in the ocean, the biology of chemical transformations and so on and that’s fantastic, it really is.  And I have many amazing colleagues who work in the upper ocean in the water column who are doing wonderful work in that regard.  You mentioned this idea of a sandwich ocean, I think that’s a great way to think about it.  We have some amazing work happening in the upper ocean to really start to connect the dots between biology and chemistry and physics.  And we have some good works starting to happen now on the seafloors, some great work in fact, just like in the upper ocean, connecting them through the middle though.  That’s probably our next grand challenge and that’s a formidable one.

Richard Jacobs: Very good.  What do you think is going to be the future insights that you’re headed towards?

Peter Girguis: Ocean science has been really reshaped by advances in molecular biology, the genomics revolution, which really began maybe about 20 to 25 years ago now, have fundamentally changed the way we think about marine microbes.  There is no doubt.  Advances in physical and chemical oceanography have also occurred that has been led by new technologies that allow us to do things we couldn’t do.  That also includes robotics, we have fleets of robotic vehicles now that people have access to for higher resolution mapping and understanding of the physics and chemistry of the ocean, so cool, right.  I think one big area, of many but one that’s important to me, is I’d love to see us talk about changing the way we go about engagement and inclusion in ocean science.

Ocean science is kind of grown out of navy research, at least it has in the United States.  And as a consequence, some of the cultures hasn’t changed in about 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years.  I think we have an opportunity to reimagine ocean science that is much more outward-looking that engages actively scientists from around the world and engages people and other stakeholders just besides we scientists.  Let me give you a specific example, Rich.

  In the United States, a lot of our research is very expeditionary in nature.  I write a grant, NSF gives me some money, we go to Fiji and we get permission from the Fijian government to work in their waters or Tonga or wherever.  Once we get there, we take aboard a person of that nation, a citizen of Fiji or Tonga, and they kind of participate in our work.  I think that we’ve done in that case is we’ve spent a lot of money on paying for diesel to move a ship across the ocean to do work that will probably end up in US research labs and advancing US interests.  And at the same time, we could have used the same or even fewer resources to do better work led by a local scientist.  Why does this matter?  Because it’s a big darn ocean and the way we do our work now takes our resources, which were always limited, and really focuses them on particular targets that are in the interest of US scientists.  We got to do better and I think advancing the engagement of stakeholders who can make scientific measurements as amateur scientists, and I mean that in the true sense of the word amateur, people who do it for love, figuring out how to support scientists around the world so that we can get a more comprehensive view of the ocean and its connectivity.  That, to me, is what I see as the future of excellent ocean science and I see no reason why we shouldn’t take that seriously and try and get there.

Richard Jacobs: That makes a lot of sense.  If you were to propose surveillance, if you were to propose funding, local people in someplace, let’s say Fiji, to do ongoing surveillance or measurements or whatever up their waters, do you think that would be supported by a US grant agency?

Peter Girguis: One of the obstacles to this idea of global ocean science in collaboration is that federal agencies are typically restricted by law to support their own national interests.  I can’t take grant money from the National Science Foundation and use it to support science in another nation.  I can pay for scientist travel, I can pay for collaboration but I can’t pay for their science.  I think that we owe it to ourselves to give this a bit of thought and to ask how is that our interests globally are shared.  And if there is anything that physically and literally connects us all, it’s the ocean.  And so finding a practical model where we realize that supporting science in other nations is actually in our best interest as well as their best interest is a wise way to proceed.

So, there are some administrative and bureaucratic impediments, Rich.  I don’t think they are insurmountable.  I think we need to start having the conversation now about why it is of value to the United States and the global community to empower scientists and other nations to do work to own their work, this isn’t a colonial approach; this is, let us help you do the work you need to empower you to manage and oversee your own communities and it benefits everybody.

Richard Jacobs: What big questions you think that you may be able to answer in the near term because of your research?

Peter Girguis: I think a lot of what our research has been pointing us to is the recognition that processes in the deep ocean are intricately and deeply tied to processes in the surface ocean, which we intern know are tied to processes on land.  So, Rich, what I think we will be doing over the years is connecting the dots between how deep-sea vents or seeps are made and how long they persist connecting the dots between that and the food that ends up on your dinner plate.  And the moment we get to the point where we have at least a better understanding and hopefully a really good understanding of those relationships, the way humankind thinks about its interaction with the world, I think, will change.  I hope to see us get beyond the feeling that we are removed from our biosphere and that we start realizing that we are intimately tied to the rest of the world because at the end of the day, even the most selfish human-centric person who doesn’t care about a single deep-sea creature, that’s fine by me, fine, but don’t think for a moment that it doesn’t affect your wellbeing and your health.  So, everyone, from the most human-centric person to the most ordinary deep-sea fish lover should recognize that an investment in our ocean is an investment in the earth and that includes humankind.

Richard Jacobs: What’s the best way for people to find out more from your work or about your work?

Peter Girguis: A lot of the work that we’ve done, we have some highlighted stuff on our website, also I would say there are some great resources that people should turn to, the ocean exploration trust, Schmidt Ocean Institute, NASA Ocean Sciences, NSF Ocean Sciences.  There’s a lot out there where people can learn about this work and more importantly, learn how to be engaged.  We need your help so I’m looking forward to hearing from you all and hopefully a chance to meet some of you.

Richard Jacobs: Great, Peter.  Thanks for coming on the podcast.  I appreciate it.

Peter Girguis: Pleasure is mine, Rich.  Be well.  Thanks for the invitation.

(End of the podcast recording)