Quantifying Thermal and Chemical Conditions within Active Seafloor Vent Deposits

各种独特的化学合成微生物生活在海底热液喷口烟囱壁上陡峭的温度和地球化学梯度中，其中一些微生物有可能产生独特的生物化学物质，可用于各种健康和药理学目的。这些微生物和其他微生物在没有太阳光线的情况下生存在热液系统中，并以从海洋中脊的地下喷出的热的、减少的液体为食。从这些喷口流出的水的温度梯度从400摄氏度变化到2摄氏度，变化幅度大约是几厘米。由于这些陡峭的梯度，目前还不可能对这些产生的微生境的地球化学特征进行定量的物理测量。这反过来又使人们难以理解生活在这些极端环境中的各种独特的微生物生命形式是如何进行代谢过程的，如何与彼此以及不断变化的地球化学环境相互作用的。本研究通过创建一个用户友好的建模代码解决了这一问题，该代码基于可逆和不可逆热力学，并结合平流和扩散的影响，可用于确定喷口烟囱中热液流体在各种化学，热和物理边界条件下的特定地球化学特征。该代码将使用在五个众所周知的热液喷口进行的特征和测量来进行测试。这项工作的更广泛的影响包括通过创建一个用户友好的生物能量学代码和一个将在互联网上公开提供的配套用户手册，为科学建设基础设施。该代码具有进入微生物学领域以及与极端环境下的生命检查和生物勘探相关领域的交叉潜力，这两个领域都对药理学和发现改善人类健康的新化合物具有影响。此外，这项工作还支持一名女性研究科学家，并培养一名女性计算地球科学研究生。

A wide variety of unique chemosynthetic microbes live in the steep thermal and geochemical gradients present in seafloor hydrothermal vent chimney walls, some of which have the potential for producing unique biochemicals that can be used for various health and pharmachological purposes. These microbes and others survive in hydrothermal systems without the benefit of light from the sun and feed off hot, reduced fluids spewing out of the subsurface on mid-ocean ridges. The thermal gradients in waters coming from these vents change from temperatures up to 400C to 2C on the order of a few centimeters. Due to these steep gradients, it is not presently possible to make quantitative physical measurements of the geochemical characteristics of these resulting microhabitats. This in turn makes it difficult to understand how the various unique microbial life forms that live in these extreme environments carry out their metabolic processes and interact with one another and their changing geochemical environment. This research solves the problem by creating a user-friendly modeling code, based on reversible and irreversible thermodynamics and incorporating the effects of advection and diffusion, that can be used to determine specific geochemical characteristics of hydrothermal fluids in vent chimneys given various chemical, thermal, and physical boundary conditions. The code will be tested using the characteristics and measurements that have been made at five well known hydrothermal vent sites. Broader impacts of the work include building infrastructure for science through the creation of a user-friendly bioenergetics code with a companion user manual that will be made publicly available on the Internet. The code has crossover potential into the field of microbiology and fields associated with examining life in extreme environments and bio-prospecting, both of which have implications for pharmacology and discovering new compounds to improve human health. In addition, the work also supports a female research scientist as well as trains a female graduate student in computational geoscience.