The Innerspace Deep Sea Initiative

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. Within this realm are found 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. 

To accelerate our understanding of the deep sea across these ocean habitats, the Innerspace Deep Sea Initiative is launching in 2024 as a partnership between the Center for Life in Extreme Environments (CLEE), a “Center of Excellence” research institute located on the campus of Portland State University (PSU); and Global Oceans, a Connecticut-based 501(c)3 operating foundation.  

Innerspace 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 nano-scale (Figure 1).
 

Innerspace will engage with international academic institutions, scientists, engineers, technology partners, tech start-ups and incubators, corporate partners, and nonprofits – to originate, enable, and facilitate new approaches to deep sea macro- to nano-scale imaging together with precision bio-sampling, micro-scale environmental sensing, and top-side omics-level analyses, to  collaboratively answer new questions about ocean life on our planet, many of which we have yet to formulate.

Access to the abyssal ocean to 6,000-meters will be enabled by the Innerspace 6000 OEV ocean exploration vehicle (Figure 2) and Innerspace 6000 TIA towed instrument array to be built for the program, together with other vehicles and instrumented landers.

Innerspace will link this new capacity to deploy deep sea instruments with leading science topics and emerging questions through four 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 new technologies can “open the aperture” of what we can question, observe, and discover in the deep sea.

Four corollary Technology Working Groups will develop and bring new technologies to deep sea exploration, and through co-design of new tools will support investigation of new questions posed by the Science Working Groups. Through workshops and symposia, hosted by CLEE, these Working Groups will develop a “scientific map” for new research and exploration (Figure 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, and the synthesis of proteins and metabolites adapted to variously function at environmental extremes, with potential for translational applications in new drug development, clean energy production, carbon capture,  synthetic biology, and conservation. 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. 

More details about the Innerspace project may be found on the Global Oceans website!