Project: Characterizing subseafloor life and environments in the Guaymas Basin

Project description from C-DEBI:
The Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California is a young marginal rift basin characterized by active seafloor spreading and rapid deposition of organic-rich sediments, characterized by extensive temperature and geochemical gradients. Deeply emplaced volcanic sills originating at the spreading center indurate and altered their surrounding sediment matrix, and shape hydrothermal circulation patterns (Einsele et al. 1980). Hydrothermal alteration and mobilization re-injects buried carbon into the biosphere (esp. as hydrocarbons and methane), a process with climate history relevance (Peter et al. 1991, Lizarralde et al. 2011). Subsurface microbial populations can intercept and process these hydrothermally generated and mobilized carbon sources (Teske et al. 2014). In support of a new IODP drilling proposal (No. 833), two Guaymas Basin site survey cruises in 2014 (RV El Puma) and 2015 (RV Sonne) are refining the 2D and 3D seismic structure of the Guaymas Basin subsurface, and collect gravity cores for up-to-date microbial and geochemical analyses. We propose combined microbiological, geochemical and sedimentological analyses to investigate subseafloor life and its environments using sediment cores that we collected on the site survey cruise with RV El Puma in October 2014.

This project was funded by a C-DEBI Research Grant.