The deep-sea floor covers 67% of the Earth’s surface, and is in most places characterized by cold temperatures, permanent darkness, high pressure and food limitation. The surface sediments host a distinct microbial biome, which is dominated by bacteria with on average a billion cells per milliliter. Benthic bacteria are highly relevant to the Earth’s element cycles as they remineralize most of the organic matter sinking from the productive surface ocean, and return nutrients, thereby promoting ocean primary production. What passes the bacterial filter is a relevant sink for carbon on geological time scales, influencing global oxygen and carbon budgets, and fuelling the deep subsurface biosphere. Despite the relevance of deep-sea sediment bacteria to climate, geochemical cycles and ecology of the seafloor, their genetic and functional diversity, niche differentiation and biological interactions remain unknown.
Within the ABYSS project, we want to develop a systematic understanding of abyssal sediment bacterial community distribution, diversity, function and interactions, by bridging biogeochemistry, ecology, microbiology and marine biology, and by combining in situ flux studies and different visualization techniques with a wide range of molecular tools. One of our main study sites is the LTER observatory HAUSGARTEN in Fram Strait.
The main tasks of the ABYSS are:
Contact: A. Boetius, C. Bienhold
Paper featuring results from the ABYSS project
Conference contributions of the ABYSS project
Theses written in the framework of ABYSS