A team from Florida Tech is on an expedition to the Atacama Trench in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The nearly 5-mile-deep oceanic trench is about 100 miles off the Chilean coast. It is part of an area of Chile that has remained at the same latitude for the last 150 million years, which means it has an extremely stable ecosystem.
Researchers are hoping to find novel microbes and chemical signatures such as proteins and carbohydrates that have existed in this area for 150 million years.
Andrew Palmer, associate professor of biological sciences who runs an astrobiology and chemical ecology lab at Florida Tech, and master’s student Caitlyn Hubric, who has studied with Palmer for the last three years, are on the Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition. They will be working on the microbiology team.
“We are part of the group that’s going to be classifying what microbes are still living down there,” Hubric told us. “And Dr. Palmer and I specifically are in charge with looking for biosignatures.”
After spending several days in the Atacama Desert, the team headed seaward on May 30 and will remain on the ship R/V Falkor (too) for the next two weeks. They will deploy a remote-operated vehicle called SuBastian that will explore the trench at depths of at least 3,000 meters, or nearly two miles down, often for 24 hours a day.
Here’s a livestream from SuBastian.
When the team finds areas of interest, SuBastian, using its robot arm, collects samples and brings them to the surface, and then returns to the depths. This “seeking and sampling” will be repeated for the duration of the expedition.
“We’re hoping to answer questions about early evolution, possible questions about how life may have moved from the ocean onto the land,” Hubric said. “And then of course, one of the big reasons we’re investigating water ecosystems is because there is a lot of popularity around Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa. So we hope that some of the questions we answer here and the questions around what signals can we find can help us in future endeavors when we do finally go explore the solar system.”
