Abstract:
This talk summarizes various investigations we have been doing to better understand the controls imparted from the overlying water column and the underlying geosphere on microbial community dynamics within shallow sediments in the offshore Scotian Slope of Atlantic Canada. Our window into this world uses lipidomic techniques coupled to porewater geochemistry that collectively get further mapped and related to deeper geologic structures as identified from available 3D geophysical surveys. This approach has been taken with both large scale, slope-wide changes as well as for targeted remotely operated vehicle (ROV) push core surveys of cold seeps in what may be one of the most expansive environmental lipidomics surveys to date. This work is part of a larger project that is in collaboration with the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources and Renewables, University of Calgary, NRCan, NetZero Atlantic, Genome Atlantic and Genome Canada, which is leading to new insights into the role of microbial geochemical cycling and the extent, diversity, and impact of Earth’s deep biosphere.