Vast and diverse microbial communities exist within the ocean. To better understand the global influence of these microorganisms on Earth’s climate, we developed a robot capable of sampling dissolved and particulate seawater biochemistry across ocean basins while still capturing the fine-scale biogeochemical processes therein. Carbon and other nutrients are acquired and released by marine microorganisms as they build and break down organic matter. The scale of the ocean makes these processes globally relevant and, at the same time, challenging to fully characterize. Microbial community composition and ocean biochemistry vary across multiple physical scales up to that of the ocean basins. Other autonomous underwater vehicles are optimized for moving continuously and, primarily, horizontally through the ocean. In contrast, Clio, the robot that we describe, is designed to efficiently and precisely move vertically through the ocean, drift laterally in a Lagrangian manner to better observe water masses, and integrate with research vessel operations to map large horizontal scales to a depth of 6000 meters. We present results that show how Clio conducts high-resolution sensor surveys and sample return missions, including a mapping of 1144 kilometers of the Sargasso Sea to a depth of 1000 meters. We further show how the samples obtain filtered biomass from seawater that enable genomic and proteomic measurements not possible through in situ sensing. These results demonstrate a robotic oceanography approach for global-scale surveys of ocean biochemistry.

海洋中存在着各种各样的微生物群落。为了更好地了解这些微生物对地球气候的全球影响，我们开发了一种能够在整个海盆中采样溶解的和颗粒状的海水生物化学的机器人，同时仍能捕获其中的精细生物地球化学过程。碳和其他营养物质是在海洋微生物建立和分解有机物质时获取和释放的。海洋的规模使这些过程在全球范围内具有相关性，同时也难以全面表征。微生物群落组成和海洋生物化学在多个物理尺度上一直变化，直至海盆。其他自主水下航行器也经过了优化，可以连续地，主要是在海洋中水平移动。相反，我们描述的Clio机器人旨在高效，精确地在海洋中垂直移动，以拉格朗日方式横向漂移以更好地观察水团，并与研究船的操作相结合，以绘制6000米深的大型水平比例尺。我们提供的结果表明，克里奥公司如何进行高分辨率的传感器调查和样品返回任务，包括将1144公里的Sargasso海映射到1000米的深度。我们进一步展示了样品如何从海水中获取过滤后的生物质，从而能够通过原位传感无法进行基因组和蛋白质组学测量。这些结果证明了机器人海洋学方法可用于全球范围的海洋生物化学调查。