Primary productivity below the seafloor at deep-sea hot springs
Date
2018-06-11Metadata
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https://hdl.handle.net/1912/10422As published
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804351115DOI
10.1073/pnas.1804351115Abstract
The existence of a chemosynthetic subseafloor biosphere was immediately recognized when deep-sea hot springs were discovered in 1977. However, quantifying how much new carbon is fixed in this environment has remained elusive. In this study, we incubated natural subseafloor communities under in situ pressure/temperature and measured their chemosynthetic growth efficiency and metabolic rates. Combining these data with fluid flux and in situ chemical measurements, we derived empirical constraints on chemosynthetic activity in the natural environment. Our study shows subseafloor microorganisms are highly productive (up to 1.4 Tg C produced yearly), fast-growing (turning over every 17–41 hours), and physiologically diverse. These estimates place deep-sea hot springs in a quantitative framework and allow us to assess their importance for global biogeochemical cycles.
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© The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.of the United States of America 115 (2018): 6756–6761, doi:10.1073/pnas.1804351115.
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Article: McNichol, Jesse C., Stryhanyuk, Hryhoriy, Sylva, Sean P., Thomas, François, Musat, Niculina, Seewald, Jeffrey S., Sievert, Stefan M., "Primary productivity below the seafloor at deep-sea hot springs", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.of the United States of America 115 (2018): 6756–6761, DOI:10.1073/pnas.1804351115, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/10422The following license files are associated with this item:
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International