Steven D’Hondt is an American

geomicrobiologist Geomicrobiology is the scientific field at the intersection of geology and microbiology and is a major subfield of geobiology. It concerns the role of microbes on geological and geochemical processes and effects of minerals and metals to microb ...

who studies

microbial communities Microbial population biology is the application of the principles of population biology to microorganisms. Distinguishing from other biological disciplines Microbial population biology, in practice, is the application of population ecology and popu ...

living beneath the

seafloor The seabed (also known as the seafloor, sea floor, ocean floor, and ocean bottom) is the bottom of the ocean. All floors of the ocean are known as 'seabeds'. The structure of the seabed of the global ocean is governed by plate tectonics. Most of ...

. He is a professor of

oceanography Oceanography (), also known as oceanology and ocean science, is the scientific study of the oceans. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of topics, including ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dynamic ...

at the

University of Rhode Island The University of Rhode Island (URI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Kingston, Rhode Island, United States. It is the flagship public research as well as the land-grant university of the state of Rhode Island ...

Career

D’Hondt earned his BS in Geology at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1984 and his PhD in Geological and Geophysical Sciences at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1990. He became an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the

in 1989, where he remains today. D’Hondt’s research program investigates the interplay between the biosphere and the physical world. In a 2009 study, his group examined sediments from below the

South Pacific Gyre __NOTOC__ The Southern Pacific Gyre is part of the Earth's system of rotating ocean currents, bounded by the Equator to the north, Australia to the west, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to the south, and South America to the east. The center of ...

, an area of ocean between

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

and

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...

where little

organic matter Organic matter, organic material, or natural organic matter refers to the large source of carbon-based compounds found within natural and engineered, terrestrial, and aquatic environments. It is matter composed of organic compounds that have c ...

falls to the seafloor. They discovered very low numbers of microbial cells and the presence of oxygen several meters down. Sediments with greater numbers of microbes lack oxygen at these depths. In a 2015 study, D’Hondt led a research group that demonstrated that oxygen penetrates the entire sediment column in as much as one third of the world’s oceans. This oxygen affects

microbial metabolism Microbial metabolism is the means by which a microbe obtains the energy and nutrients (e.g. carbon) it needs to live and reproduce. Microbes use many different types of metabolic strategies and species can often be differentiated from each other ...

in these sediments and may be transported into the underlying mantle. In 2021, his group published evidence that splitting of water by natural radiation is the principal energy source for microbial communities in marine sediment older than a few million years. D’Hondt led the Subsurface Biospheres team of the

NASA Astrobiology Institute The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was established in 1998 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) "to develop the field of astrobiology and provide a scientific framework for flight missions." In December 2019 the institute' ...

from 2001 to 2006. He was an Executive Committee member of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations from 2010 to 2022. He has long been involved with the international scientific drilling community. He was co-chief scientist of

Ocean Drilling Program The Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) was a multinational effort to explore and study the composition and structure of the Earth's oceanic basins. ODP, which began in 1985, was the successor to the Deep Sea Drilling Project initiated in 1968 by th ...

Leg 201 and

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) was an international marine research program. The program used heavy drilling equipment mounted aboard ships to monitor and sample sub-seafloor environments. With this research, the IODP documented e ...

Expedition 329, the first and second ocean drilling expeditions to focus primarily on life beneath the seafloor. D’Hondt is a member of the

American Geophysical Union The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary scientists and enthusiasts that according to their website includes 130,000 people (not members). AGU's act ...

, the American Society for Microbiology, and the

Geochemical Society The Geochemical Society is a nonprofit scientific organization founded to encourage the application of chemistry to solve problems involving geology and cosmology. The society promotes understanding of geochemistry through the annual Goldschmidt Co ...

Honors

In 2022, D’Hondt was made a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Selected publications

D'Hondt has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications with over 10,000 citations and an h-index of 51. Among them are: * Sauvage, Justine F.; Flinders, Ashton; Spivack, Arthur J.; Pockalny, Robert; Dunlea, Ann G.; Anderson, Chloe H.; Smith, David C.; Murray, Richard W.; D’Hondt, Steven (2021-02-26). "The contribution of water radiolysis to marine sedimentary life". ''Nature Communications''. 12 (1): 1297. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-21218-z.

ISSN An International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication, such as a magazine. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. ISSNs ...

2041-1723 * D’Hondt, Steven; Inagaki, Fumio; Zarikian, Carlos Alvarez; Abrams, Lewis J.; Dubois, Nathalie; Engelhardt, Tim; Evans, Helen; Ferdelman, Timothy; Gribsholt, Britta; Harris, Robert N.; Hoppie, Bryce W.; Hyun, Jung-Ho; Kallmeyer, Jens; Kim, Jinwook; Lynch, Jill E. (2015-04). "Presence of oxygen and aerobic communities from sea floor to basement in deep-sea sediments". ''Nature Geoscience''. 8 (4): 299–304. doi:10.1038/ngeo2387.

1752-0894. * Kallmeyer, Jens; Pockalny, Robert; Adhikari, Rishi Ram; Smith, David C.; D’Hondt, Steven (2012-10-02). "Global distribution of microbial abundance and biomass in subseafloor sediment". ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences''. 109 (40): 16213–16216. doi:10.1073/pnas.1203849109.

0027-8424. PMC 3479597.

PMID PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

22927371. *D'Hondt, Steven; Jørgensen, Bo Barker; Miller, D. Jay; Batzke, Anja; Blake, Ruth; Cragg, Barry A.; Cypionka, Heribert; Dickens, Gerald R.; Ferdelman, Timothy; Hinrichs, Kai-Uwe; Holm, Nils G.; Mitterer, Richard; Spivack, Arthur; Wang, Guizhi; Bekins, Barbara (2004-12-24). "Distributions of Microbial Activities in Deep Subseafloor Sediments". ''Science''. 306 (5705): 2216–2221. doi:10.1126/science.1101155.

0036-8075. * *Rutherford, Scott; D'Hondt, Steven; Prell, Warren (19 August 1999)''. "Environmental controls on the geographic distribution of zooplankton diversity". Nature. 400 (6746): 749–753.

Bibcode The bibcode (also known as the refcode) is a compact identifier used by several astronomical data systems to uniquely specify literature references. Adoption The Bibliographic Reference Code (refcode) was originally developed to be used in SIM ...

:1999Natur.400..749R. doi:10.1038/23449. PMID.

S2CID Semantic Scholar is an artificial intelligence–powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly released in November 2015. It uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries ...

4418045.'' *

References

External links

Oceanographer reveals link between subseafloor life and global climate
Todd Mcleish in ''

Phys.org Phys.org is an online science, research and technology news aggregator offering briefs from press releases and reports from news agencies (a form of journalism sometimes pejoratively called churnalism). The website also produces its own science jo ...

'' {{DEFAULTSORT:D'Hondt, Steven Living people American marine biologists University of Rhode Island faculty Princeton University alumni Stanford University alumni Geomicrobiologists American ecologists Year of birth missing (living people) 20th-century American biologists 21st-century American biologists

Career

Honors

Selected publications

See also

References

External links