DCO is a community of scientists, including biologists, physicists, geoscientists and chemists, whose work crosses several traditional disciplinary lines to develop the new, integrative field of deep carbon science.

To complement this research, the DCO's infrastructure includes public engagement and education, online and offline community support, innovative data management, and novel instrumentation development.

Jesse Ausubel, a faculty member at Rockefeller University and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, was in attendance and later sought out Hazen's book, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins.

After two years of planning and collaboration, Hazen and colleagues officially launched the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) in August 2009, with its secretariat based at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC.

Members of the Reservoirs and Fluxes Community are conducting research as a part of the Deep Earth Carbon Degassing Project to make tangible advances towards quantifying the amount of carbon outgassed from the Earth's deep interior (core, mantle, crust) into the surface environment (e.g. biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere) through naturally occurring processes.

The Deep Energy Community uses field-based investigations of approximately 25 globally representative terrestrial and marine environments to determine processes controlling the origin, form, quantities and movements of abiotic gases and organic species in Earth's crust and uppermost mantle.

Deep Energy also uses DCO-sponsored instrumentation, especially revolutionary isotopologue measurements, to discriminate between the abiotic and biotic methane gas and organic species sampled from global terrestrial and marine field sites.

Another research activity of Deep Energy is to quantify the mechanisms and rates of fluid-rock interactions that produce abiotic hydrogen and organic compounds as a function of temperature, pressure, fluid and solid compositions.