Andrew Thurber
My name’s Andrew Thurber, I’m an assistant professor at Oregon State University.

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His team is diving under the sea ice to investigate microbes that eat methane.

Andrew Thurber
What we’re really interested in studying is how the marine methane cycle works in the Antarctic and the southern ocean. Methane is a greenhouse gas, about 25 times as efficient at warming our atmosphere than CO2 and yet we know almost nothing about how it is actually consumed within the southern ocean.

There’s vast reservoirs of methane in the marine environment and what we know from everywhere else on the planet is that as this methane is released it’s consumed by bacteria and archaea and kept out of the atmosphere.

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As ice sheets melt, these reservoirs will discharge huge amounts of new methane into the ocean.

Andrew Thurber
If these microbes are incapable of consuming the methane as it’s released from the seafloor or if there’s a lag time as the microbial communities develop, all of our climate models are going to be pretty wrong, because they assume all of the methane released from the marine environment is turned into CO2 by the time it gets to the atmosphere. It’s what these microbes do, but they have to be there and they be doing it, and we don’t know.

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Fortunately, the waters near NSF’s McMurdo Station are the perfect place to study the phenomenon.

Andrew Thurber
So what brings us down this year is in 2011 we found a site that has active methane cycling and it gives us the opportunity for the first time to actually understand how methane is consumed in the Antarctic, whether its consumed like it is other places on the planet, which is what we really hope, essentially keeping the methane out of the atmosphere, and whether we can apply the paradigms or the models, what we know from the other parts of the planet, to the southern ocean.

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Colonies of these microbes are found in large white mats on the seafloor.

Andrew Thurber
We’re diving essentially on the side of an active volcano here; Erebus is our front doorstep. The sediment here, unlike many areas, is dark dark black.

Hydrogen sulfide when it precipitates out, is bright white and so it creates these really beautiful white patches on the otherwise black volcanic seafloor. So that’s what cues us in that this is an area where that’s going on.

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It’s the chance to study these habitats closer than ever before.

Andrew Thurber
We have kind of two different aspects to this work. One is characterizing the environment and the other is characterizing the microbial community.

Our trip down here was short and it was mostly to collect samples. We have a lot of molecular analysis with the microbes and a lot of the characterization of the chemical environment within the sediment.

We definitely need to analyze the concentration of methane, see whether the microbes are unique to that particular site, and then use some bioinformatics and next gen sequencing techniques to really understand where they fit into the greater scheme.

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The NSF-managed U.S. Antarctic Program provides the infrastructure to do this groundbreaking science, which has global implications.

Andrew Thurber
The National Science Foundation funded this work and this is very fundamental, basic science that both advances basic discovery of what sort of microbes are in the southern ocean, but also with real societal role of trying to understand how methane from the Antarctic may impact our ability to predict the future.