The first Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) Summer School will be held 13-18 July 2014 at Big Sky Resort in Montana with fieldwork in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. The five-day residential graduate course will introduce approximately 30 students, postdocs, and/or early-career researchers interested in deep carbon science to the interdisciplinary concepts that are the cornerstone of DCO’s approach to understanding Earth. Lodging, meals, and field trips will be provided at no cost to summer school students, and expenses for economy travel to the school location will be fully reimbursed in most cases. Applications are due by Monday, 31 March 2014.  A link to the online application can be found on the summer school website at: http://deepcarbon.net/feature/deep-carbon-observatory-summer-school#.Uyn9tGgdR4j

The course content is being built around demonstrating the active role of deep carbon in the natural field environment at Yellowstone. This stunning location provides access to deep carbon through degassing of deep volatiles at a volcano, through surface and crustal fluid interactions, through exploration of extreme biological habitats, and through the geological evolution of Earth’s habitable surface above a deep mantle plume through time. The course will introduce the fundamental broad themes of the DCO and aims to bridge conventional science disciplines in exploring the new exciting deep carbon science—including how to share and use interdisciplinary data.

Adrian Jones (University College London) and John Baross (University of Washington) are organizing the summer school. Other instructors include David Cole (Ohio State University), Peter Fox (Rensselaer), Robert Hazen (Carnegie Institution of Washington), Claude Jaupart (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris), Craig Manning (UCLA), Bernard Marty (Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques), and Mitch Sogin (Marine Biological Laboratory).