Microbes Likely Abundant Hundreds of Meters Below Sea Floor 68
sciencehabit writes "Samples drilled from 3.5-million-year-old seafloor rocks have yielded the strongest evidence yet that a variety of microorganisms live deeply buried within the ocean's crust. These microbes make their living by consuming methane and sulfate compounds dissolved in the mineral-rich waters flowing through the immense networks of fractures in the crust. The new find confirms that the ancient lavas formed at midocean ridges and found throughout deep ocean basins are by volume the largest ecosystem on Earth, scientists say."
Re:First life form (Score:4, Insightful)
Possible, but more likely that it branched away from another more abundant form, filled a niche in and was pretty much forgotten about by everything else. Not to say that it couldn't well be an exceptionally early form that simply never changed.
Hazen (Score:5, Insightful)
The take away from all these stories (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hazen (Score:5, Insightful)
What about in the outer core? How do the microbes survive in liquid iron?
Oh, you just meant in the crust, right? So finding life hundreds of meters below the surface in the crust might actually be a surprise? 6371 km deep, there is no life. 0 km deep there is a lot of life. The question is how deep life can survive (between 0 and 6371 km). Now we know it can survive hundreds of meters below the surface in cracked rocks. Can it survive deeper than this? It certainly can't survive down to the core, so there must be some interface boundary where even the most extreme of extremophiles won't survive. That is the point, and that is why this finding is new.
Re:Hazen (Score:2, Insightful)
He says no matter where you go on earth, deep into sea sediments or the rock of deep undergrounds mines, every cubic inch of the Earth is teaming with microbes.
Yesh, but saying it and actually demonstrating it using samples are two entirely different things. That still makes it pretty much new.