News Brief
May 04, 2017 
RICHLAND, Wash. - Organic matter found in vast quantities in oxygen-starved floodplains would yield only minimal energy for hungry microorganisms, which spurn the meal, researchers show in a study published this week in Nature Geoscience.
The soils beneath our feet contain more carbon than all of the world's plants and the atmosphere combined, and knowing the fate of this organic matter is crucial to understand the future of our planet. The new findings, made by a team which includes Malak Tfaily of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a D.O.E. Office of Science user facility at DOE's Pacific Northwest National Lab, helps explain why microbes sometimes don't break down all the accessible carbon.
Tfaily's work at EMSL was instrumental in showing that the accessible carbon left by the microbes in deep sediment layers is a poor source of energy that would have required more energy from the microbes to degrade than they would have received in return. The team made the findings by using high-resolution mass spectrometry to analyze core samples of buried sediments from 4 floodplains in the upper Colorado River Basin in the states of Colorado and New Mexico.
More information about the study, which was led by researchers at Stanford University, is accessible through Stanford's news release.
Tags: Environment, Fundamental Science, EMSL, Carbon Capture and Sequestration, Climate Science, Subsurface Science, Mass Spectrometry and Separations, Microbiology
EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab, is a D.O.E. Office of Science User Facility. Located at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Wash., EMSL offers an open, collaborative environment for scientific discovery to researchers around the world. Its integrated computational and experimental resources enable researchers to realize important scientific insights and create new technologies. Follow EMSL on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Interdisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest National Lab address many of America's most pressing issues in energy, the environment and national security through advances in basic and applied science. Founded in 1965, PNNL employs 4,400 staff and has an yearly budget of nearly $1 billion. It is managed by Battelle for the D.O.E.'s Office of Science. As the single biggest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information on PNNL, visit the PNNL News Center, or follow PNNL on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
