Exploring Extreme Ocean Habitats at the Micro Scale

Earth’s deep ocean represents 95% of the ocean’s total volume, the largest and least explored of Earth’s biosphere. Less than 0.0001% of the deep ocean’s area has been scientifically investigated (Figure 1). Within this realm is found an array of habitats and ecosystems characterized by extreme conditions of high hydrostatic pressure, very low to very high temperatures, perpetual darkness, toxic biochemical habitats, hyper-salinity, severe nutrient restriction, and hypoxic or anoxic habitats devoid of oxygen.

Innerspace is a newly launched initiative to host a research, operational, training, and public outreach platform centered at CLEE, jointly managed by CLEE and Global Oceans, with close participation from international collaborators and partner institutions.

It will focus on exploring important scientific questions about biodiversity and survival in extreme environments found in the deep sea and will catalyze fresh thinking about the integration of new technologies to enable high-resolution imaging, environmental sensing, and omics-level analyses of organisms from the macro- to the nano-scale (Figure 2).

Innerspace will enable scientific investigations that span biological life across habitats from hydrothermal vents to frozen methane seeps and across organismal scale and life history stages from embryos to adults. Innerspace will expand our ability to understand deep ocean life by bringing together engineering expertise, new technologies, and scientists studying deep sea ecosystems, molecular systems, and biophysics – to collaboratively answer new questions about ocean life on our planet, many of which we have yet to formulate.

Innerspace will explore the morphology, behavior, and diversity of deep sea organisms in their natural environment with new high-resolution microscopic imaging systems, deployed by a 6,000-meter deep sea ROV specially-built for the program to be named the Innerspace 6000 OEV (Ocean Exploration Vehicle), coupled with a suite of environmental sensors and biosamplers.

Innerspace is designed to link this new opportunity to deploy multi-technology, multi-user deep sea assets with several leading science topics and emerging questions through four core Science Working Groups: Deep Sea Biodiversity & Conservation, Astrobiology and Origin of Life, Marine Genetic Resources, and an open-ended working group entitled Innerspace at the Micro-Spatial Scale - an exploration into how novel technologies can “open the aperture” of what we can question, observe, and discover in the deep sea.

Four Technology Working Groups will develop and bring new technologies to deep sea exploration, and through co-design of new instruments and tools - for micro-spatial-scale imaging, sampling, environmental sensing, and data processing -  will support investigation of new questions posed by the Science Working Groups.

To ensure that innovation and scientific discovery is fostered and optimized in the context of a large-scale multi-disciplinary collaboration, the project framework has been structured to benefit from a combination of small working groups, conducive to innovative and “disruptive” approaches, and larger collaborative working groups and external partnerships, effective at “developing and refining” problem-solving strategies (2). Best practices from successful large-scale research programs will be benchmarked to foster high quality data collection from a diverse group of collaborators (3).

Innerspace will explore novel metabolic and biophysical adaptations to extreme ocean environments, deep sea planktonic biodiversity and distribution, “microbial dark matter" representing uncharted branches of the tree of life (4), and the synthesis of proteins and metabolites adapted to variously function at high temperatures, high-pressure, low oxygen, low pH, and hypersalinity, with potential for translational applications in novel drug development, clean energy production, carbon capture, and synthetic biology.

These discoveries will generate insights into the origin of life, the potential diversity of astrobiological life forms and biosignatures, and mechanisms of adaptation to future planetary extremes here on Earth.

Our objective is to foster a new transdisciplinary collaborative approach and technology platform to enable deep sea discoveries that will help to answer some of the most important and challenging questions facing humanity and planet Earth.

1. Rogers, A. D., et al. "Delving deeper: critical challenges for 21st century deep-sea research." Position paper 22 (2015): 224.

2. Wu, Lingfei, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans. "Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology." Nature 566.7744 (2019): 378-382.

3. Auad, Guillermo, and Francis K. Wiese, eds. Partnerships in Marine Research: Case Studies, Lessons Learned, and Policy Implications. Elsevier, 2021.

4. Schultz, Júnia, et al. "Shedding light on the composition of extreme microbial dark matter: alternative approaches for culturing extremophiles." Frontiers in Microbiology14 (2023): 1167718.