How can upscaling make a contribution to research about the subsurface biosphere?
There is a lot of molecular-scale research going on in biology in general and in research about the subsurface. The problem is that if you learn something about a cell in the lab, you don’t know how that translates to an observation of a real problem in the environment. We are finding that there are a number of different characteristic time and length scales that define different processes – for example the movement of microbes in porous media. Our goal is to identify scaling laws that will allow us to incorporate insights gained through microscale work and better predict bulk behavior at the macroscale of the environment or of engineered systems. My main message is that it is possible to relate fundamental microscale (cellular, subscellular) processes to how those processes work in more complicated environments. Biofilms are a good example – say you understand how a cell works, and you then put those cells in a biofilm, and the biofilm in a porous medium – you might say, “I’m no longe
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