Though the concept of the biomarker emerged from attempts to infer the provenance of petroleum and the incidence of life on the young earth—for all the successes and disappointments of the early studies on Precambrian rocks, lunar dust, and oil shales—it was in the sediments of the deep sea that biomarkers really came into their own. The Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) was initiated in the 1960s by a consortium of American oceanographic research institutions, but institutions in Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany were quick to sign on. In what began as an effort to understand the makeup and dynamics of the earth’s crust and mantle, the DSDP’s special research ship traveled the world’s oceans, drilling thousands of meters into the seafloor to retrieve sediment cores that soon became coveted objects of study for geologists, oceanographers, biologists, paleontologists, and geochemists around the world. When Geoff’s group started analyzing the DSDP sediments in the early 1970s, most of the organic chemists involved with the program were from the oil industry and formed part of the drill ship’s safety program, monitoring the cores as they were brought on deck to ensure that dangerous accumulations of gas or liquid hydrocarbons weren’t being penetrated. But Geoff saw the DSDP as the perfect opportunity to wean his Bristol lab of its dependence on NASA’s Apollo program—a chance to bring his full attention back to Earth and its still largely unexplored realm of fossil molecules. The British Natural Environment Research Council had earmarked a large pot of funding for work on the cores, which would be unencumbered by the narrow commercial goals and secrecy that surrounded the limited offerings from oil-company bore holes. Geoff’s budding Organic Geochemistry Unit would be aligned with a multidisciplinary community of scientists who were all studying the same cores, working cooperatively, and publishing freely. And, unlike the lunar samples, ocean sediments were rife with interesting organic compounds, including many entirely unforeseen structures. Most of the cores consisted of sediments that had been laid down and buried sequentially without ever being subjected to the tectonic turmoil of stretching and subsidence, and the overlying kilometers of cold water had kept their temperatures relatively low.
Mud extrusion and ring-fault gas seepage – upward branching fluid discharge at a deep-sea mud volcano