The essays below will help you to understand the goals and objectives of the mission and provide additional context and information about the places being explored and the science, tools, and technologies being used.
Jolted by the planet’s biggest earthquakes, sequestering massive reservoirs of methane, while slowly swallowing a mid-ocean ridge, the Chilean margin offers an inspiring natural laboratory for investigating the complex interactions among the solid earth, the deep ocean, and the biosphere.
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The Chile coastline stretches along for more than 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles). Its geology and biology provide an incredible natural laboratory for the study of how life on our earth functions and has evolved.
Read moreBy Christopher German
The deep ocean is a vast and mostly unexplored system. It is also the largest, single, contiguous (joined together, without a break) habitat for life on our planet.
Read moreBy Benjamin Grupe
Chile’s deep-sea floor is a region of extremes. Here we can find extremely low oxygen in what is affectionately called the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ); extremely cold and deep water in the Chile trench (nearly 6.45 kilometers/4 miles down!); sediments full of extremely toxic sulfides and methane at cold seeps; and extremely hot water at hydrothermal vents (at least we are pretty sure these exist).
Read moreBy Ashlee Henig, Donna Blackman, and Christopher German
The Chile margin is composed of submerged continental shelf extending from the west coast of Chile into the Pacific Ocean. It is is as geologically diverse as it is long.
Read moreBy Monica Heintz
Methane (CH4) (figure 1) is the simplest hydrocarbon, and is the primary component of the natural gas that we burn for energy.
Read moreBy Andrew Thurber
The deep sea is cold, dark, and inhospitable to humans, but it holds untold and unknown biodiversity (number and variety of organisms found in a region).
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