Professor Studies a Mystery of the Deep

Janzen, left, prepares to board the deep-sea submersible Alvin.

by Erin Markel '07

This story originally appeared in the winter 2005 issue of Spotlight.

The ocean floor might not seem like an obvious place for a chemistry experiment, but for Associate Professor of Chemistry Chris Janzen, the location of the Pacific Ocean hydrothermal vents was a valuable learning site.

Clustered around these vents is an entire ecosystem located more than a mile beneath the ocean's surface, further than light can penetrate. This hidden world gets its energy not from sunlight, but from chemistry.

Last April, Janzen traveled to the East Pacific Rise on a research cruise and had the chance to see this unique ecosystem with his own eyes through the windows of deep-sea diving Alvin, the same submersible that explored the Titanic wreck.

Janzen and 25 other scientists studied this ecosystem during the trip, using Alvin to get a rare chance to conduct deep-sea research. Janzen's work during this sabbatical focused on how the chemistry of hydrothermal vents and the organisms that live around them make an impact on each other.

To do this, Janzen traveled to the bottom of the ocean in Alvin twice. Janzen, another scientist and a pilot shared the six-foot-diameter submersible from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. "It's very cramped," Janzen said. "There are no restroom facilities, so we were working caffeine-free as well."

It took an hour and a half to reach the bottom, where Alvin conducted scans of temperature and iron, manganese, oxygen and sulfide levels. Sulfide levels are crucial to understanding this ecosystem, because sulfide is the energy source of the bacteria on which the vent-dwelling organisms feed.

Janzen originally planned to spend his sabbatical learning from a colleague who pioneered electrochemical techniques to measure sulfide.

One day, Janzen received an e-mail from his colleague, beginning, "So Chris, you claustrophobic?" The professor had gotten him a space on the cruise and the opportunity to go diving with Alvin.

Consequently, Janzen learned the techniques in the Pacific Ocean instead. Such techniques are valuable to the university's ongoing research at Centralia, the site of a still-burning underground mine fire in central Pennsylvania. The town has been the subject of interdisciplinary research by both students and faculty members.

Janzen is one of the authors of several papers that will be published as a result of the cruise. He and his colleagues also presented their findings at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in March 2005 in San Diego, Calif.