Program Works to Cultivate a Network of Deep-Sea Diplomats

The science of the deep sea and the technology to explore it are still in their relative infancy, and the vast majority of the seafloor remains unexplored. Despite how little is understood about this mysterious, potentially fragile ecosystem, there’s been growing interest in leveraging the minerals and rocks at the bottom of the ocean for human activities like deep-sea mining and carbon sequestration.

Senior Research Scientist Beth Orcutt, also Bigelow Laboratory’s vice president for research, is a leader in the study of how deep-sea ecosystems function and respond to change. She’s also an ocean diplomat working to ensure that science guides international negotiations around those seafloor activities, especially deep-sea mining.

As part of that effort, Orcutt is principal investigator and associate director of COBRA, the Crustal Ocean Biosphere Research Accelerator project funded by the National Science Foundation. Since 2021, COBRA has worked to accelerate understanding of the deep sea explicitly to inform decision-making. This month, for example, COBRA organized a side event at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington D.C., bringing together scientists with legislative staff and nonprofit experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for American leadership in deep-sea research to inform policy on seafloor activities.

“We have these emerging human uses of the deep sea, like deep-sea mining, carbon sequestration, and marine carbon dioxide removal,” Orcutt said. “We need to get scientists more involved in doing the necessary research, sharing information with policy makers, and summarizing what the big knowledge gaps are to inform decision-making.”

COBRA was born out of a larger NSF-funded effort called the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations. For 10 years, C-DEBI cultivated an emerging community of scientists across the country focused on life living in extreme environments below the seafloor. As that program came to an end, Orcutt and others sought to continue that work. But COBRA, funded by NSF’s AccelNet program, is aimed less at directly supporting new science than on supporting information sharing and the networking of scientists and decision makers.

“COBRA is an opportunity to focus — at a global level — on what we need to know and study around the deep seafloor biosphere to help inform good decision-making,” said Rosalynn Sylvan, the program’s managing director who is based at Bigelow Laboratory.

Orcutt and Sylvan are core to COBRA’s small, nationally-distributed leadership team, which is led by Director Julie Huber, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Huber and Orcutt swapped director roles when Orcutt became vice president for research). The program serves as a nexus to, what Orcutt called, a “huge constellation” of partners with diverse expertise and priorities from around the world.

Those partners come together for several COBRA-led activities. The flagship program is a master class to teach early and mid-career scientists how to propose, lead, and execute a successful deep-sea expedition, an undertaking Orcutt likened to “a mission to Mars.”

“We wanted to demystify that process because, to solve a lot of these major knowledge gaps we’ve identified, we simply need more people equipped to do challenging deep-sea research,” she said.

COBRA also hosts monthly webinars providing a forum for scientists to share the latest from their fields and discuss their efforts to translate science to policymakers. The program provides small stipends for research exchanges and professional development for early career scientists. And the COBRA team is also working to engage K-12 learners and their teachers to inspire future generations with the sort of exciting discoveries that inspired her.

Core to the COBRA mission is an effort to create a cohort of ocean diplomats to advocate for science-based decision-making, an outcome that will help advance challenging research and policy in the core areas COBRA has identified like deep-sea mining but could also benefit ocean science more broadly.

By engaging proactively with scientists across disciplines and with policy makers, scientists can learn valuable skills on how to synthesize complex information, find linkages between different issues, and communicate their research in a way that is broadly accessible and meaningful. And, on the flipside, that engagement with policy can also help them prioritize the questions and research they want to pursue.

“The lessons learned from this activity are very translatable to other science areas we work on that have a lens for informing decision makers,” Orcutt said. “It’s about creating opportunities to get scientists more involved, or at least more comfortable, with being science diplomats and ambassadors in whatever field they work.”

Photo Captions:

Photo 1: Scientists monitor data in the control room during the Octopus Odyssey (too) expedition aboard the R/V Falkor (too) in 2023, an expedition which Orcutt co-led that illustrated the unique challenges — and exciting possibilities — of the deep-sea research COBRA is trying to advance (Credit: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute).

Photo 2: Orcutt, associate director of COBRA, speaks at a recent side event for scientists and legislative staff on U.S. leadership in deep-sea research held during the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in December 2024. At the same meeting, Orcutt received the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Voyager Award, presented each year to recognize a mid-career scientist’s significant contributions and leadership in the field (Credit: Rosalynn Sylvan).

Photo 3: Steve Auscavitch, then a postdoctoral associate at Boston University, learns new genetic techniques during an exchange in 2023 with a lab at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center made possible by an early-career accelerator grant from COBRA (Credit: Meredith Everett).

Photo 4: Participants of a COBRA mini-workshop focused on seafloor microbial ecosystem services pose at the 2023 Deep Ocean Collective Solution Accelerator in La Jolla, Calif. (Courtesy of Beth Orcutt).