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Seafloor oxygen consumption fuelled by methane from cold seeps

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 725–734 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

The leakage of cold, methane-rich fluids from subsurface reservoirs to the sea floor at specific sites on continental slopes, termed cold seeps, sustains some of the richest ecosystems on the sea bed. These seep-fuelled communities utilize around two orders of magnitude more oxygen per unit area than non-seep seafloor communities. Much of the oxygen is consumed by microbes and animal–microbe symbioses that use methane as an energy source. The proportion of methane consumed varies with fluid flow rate, ranging from 80% in seeps with slow fluid flow to less than 20% in seeps where fluid flow is high. Assuming the presence of a few tens of thousands of active cold seep systems on continental slopes worldwide, we estimate that the total efflux of methane to the overlying ocean could reach 0.02 Gt of carbon annually. As much more methane is lost from continental slopes, be it through emission to the hydrosphere or consumption by microbes, than can be produced, we suggest that a substantial fraction of the methane that fuels seep ecosystems is sourced from deep carbon buried kilometres under the sea floor.

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Figure 1: Oxygen uptake at seep and non-seep sites.
Figure 2: Cold seep habitats with typical communities of bacterial mats.
Figure 3: Cold-seep methane and carbon fluxes at continental slopes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues J. Felden, J. Lipp, E. Ruff, K. Wallmann, G. Wegener and M. Zabel for joint discussions in the preparation of this manuscript. This is a contribution to MARUM research (www.marum.de/en) and to the Deep Carbon Observatory project (http://deepcarbon.net). A.B. received additional funds from the Leibniz project of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the ERC project ABYSS (Assessment of Bacterial Life and Matter Cycling in Deep-Sea Surface Sediments, no. 294757).

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  1. HGF MPG Group on Deep Sea Ecology and Technology, Alfred-Wegener-Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, Bremerhaven, 27515, Germany

    Antje Boetius & Frank Wenzhöfer

  2. Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Celsiusstr. 1, Bremen, 28359, Germany

    Antje Boetius & Frank Wenzhöfer

  3. MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University Bremen, Bremen, 28359, Germany

    Antje Boetius

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Boetius, A., Wenzhöfer, F. Seafloor oxygen consumption fuelled by methane from cold seeps. Nature Geosci 6, 725–734 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1926

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