Scientists Identify Vast Underground Ecosystem Containing Billions of Micro-organisms (theguardian.com) 87
The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to "deep life" studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of that found in all the world's oceans. From a report: Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet. Researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory say the diversity of underworld species bears comparison to the Amazon or the Galapagos Islands, but unlike those places the environment is still largely pristine because people have yet to probe most of the subsurface.
"It's like finding a whole new reservoir of life on Earth," said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "We are discovering new types of life all the time. So much of life is within the Earth rather than on top of it." The team combines 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology and microbiology to chemistry and physics. A year before the conclusion of their 10-year study, they will present an amalgamation of findings to date before the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting opens this week.
"It's like finding a whole new reservoir of life on Earth," said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "We are discovering new types of life all the time. So much of life is within the Earth rather than on top of it." The team combines 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology and microbiology to chemistry and physics. A year before the conclusion of their 10-year study, they will present an amalgamation of findings to date before the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting opens this week.
Wow, that's a huge find alright. (Score:4, Insightful)
The question now is how was this overlooked for so long? This really gives credence to the possibility of life under the surface on Mars or other planetary bodies, panspermia, all of that. Wow. Big, big big.
Re:Wow, that's a huge find alright. (Score:5, Informative)
The question now is how was this overlooked for so long?
It wasn't. This has been well known for decades. This new research didn't "discover" subterranean life, they mostly just quantified and categorized it.
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It has been known for decades. I read about it long ago, with the estimates of biomass in much the same ballpark as these.
Well then, pony up Bill, let's see you wheel out the decades old citations that closely match the discoveries of these scientists.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#Origins_of_petroleum
In a 1992 paper "The Deep Hot Biosphere" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[56] Gold first suggested that microbial life is widespread in the porosity of the crust of the Earth, down to depths of several kilometers,
Now fuck off.
According to your own words then, this has not been "known for decades".
Someone hypothesizing that something sort of like this might be true does not make that thing "known". Only collecting actual evidence can do that. And that is what this study is publishing, a whole lot of, yes, new research. We have been making remarkable advances in scientific tools and this changes the data we can collect. No, this is not stuff "we knew long ago". These observations we could only make recently.
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1993 https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
1980
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Many others. Basically scientists got curious about what possible risks to unknoqn biospheres could exist from burying radioactive waste and started looking, and kept finding bacteria in really absurd places. Plus the petroleum industry always had an interest in the topic because it helps explain certain sources of biomass that may well be producing some sources of carbon fuels that don't quit fit the usual "buried ancient plant mat
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It sounds like you were trying to downplay the significance of these discoveries
Not at all. It is important research. They made many important new discoveries. But they did NOT discover that "there is life down there". We already knew that.
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No, he didn't. His first post, verbatim:
It wasn't. This has been well known for decades. This new research didn't "discover" subterranean life, they mostly just quantified and categorized it.
It's the deep staph (Score:2)
see, steve bannon was right, there is a deep staph, it surrounds us. it penetrates us. It binds the universe together. Race Bannon and Johnny quest found this a long time ago when they journeyed to the center of the earth and brought back Yoda and Hitler.
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When you walk through the forest, the obvious impression you'll get is that it is a phenomenon consisting principally of trees. In fact it would be more accurate to characterize a forest as a vast network of fungal mycelia in a symbiotic relationship with a superficial layer of trees. If Mark Watney's martian survival depended on some kind of tree, he'd be screwed without the fungi it depends upon.
But to see this truer picture, you literally have to dig deeper.
In the same vein, I once heard a talk by E.O
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Well known and doubted for a while (Score:2)
Thomas Gold [wikipedia.org] and Russian researchers before him were looking at this back in the 1950's. He wrote a book The Deep Hot Biosphere [springer.com]. One might suppose that the strident opponents of the theory (and Gold) have died or retired so science can now progress in this area.
For the last time (Score:4, Funny)
Billions of micro-organisms (Score:3)
There are billions of micro-organisms in a pot of yogurt. Did you mean billions of species, or billions of tons?
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There are billions of micro-organisms in a pot of yogurt. Did you mean billions of species, or billions of tons?
I assume you're addressing the difference between the title of TFS (billions of organisms and the content of TFS ("billions of tonnes"). I guess they should have cited the conversion factor.
One source [stackexchange.com] I found says, "The human body has 10^13 human cells and hosts 9x10^13 bacterial cells." and "mass of bacterial cells in one human body = (0.95×10^15 * 9x10^13) kg = 0.0855 kg = 86 g". So, 1 gram of bacterial cells comprises 9 * 10^13 cells / 86, or 1,058,823,529,412. A metric ton (tonne) is a million gram
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Ugly bags of mostly water....
Actually they are pretty smart (Score:1)
And just about all of them are smarter than a Trump voter.
So twice as smart as you then...
If you stop to think about it, organisms that chose to live out of the range of humans who could eat them are obviously way smarter than you or I.
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Not sure about that, little Ken Doll. I was smart enough to leave a huge load of sperm in your mom without catching any of her STD's.
So how's that brain rot from the syphilis you were born with coming along?
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Exactly! (Score:2)
Yep. Biding their time and laying low until we wipe ourselves out. ... then our remains subduct and THEY feed on US!
See, told you they were smart. And vastly more patient. Sure beats a bad movie plot where they ooze up through a deep oil rig and try to kill us all, ineffectually.
Scale (Score:2)
There is a big difference between "Billions of Micro-organisms" which is a few grams and "Billions of tonnes of Micro-organisms" from the summary.
Mars (Score:3)
Would be neat if we found the same thing on Mars.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Would be neat if we found the same thing on Mars.
And not entirely surprising if they turn out to be related.
Large impacts such as the dino-killer asteroid would have sent large many tonnes of life-bearing rock all over the solar system, including to Europa.
If we do find such life deep under Mars, one question will be which came first.
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Just curious - is that true ? a) escape velocity b) sizable rocks not just vaporized rocks c) not so hot of an impact to annihilate any actual life on said rocks?
Yes, for a sufficiently large impact, such as Chicxulub.
It is also a very serious idea that life did not originate on earth, but started from meteorites containing simple organisms like the above.
Not "on said rocks", but deep inside them, in order to survive radiation on the long cold journey.
It would explain why the first life appeared so early in Earth's history.
Panspermia hypothesis [google.com.au]
PBS SpaceTime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Turns out we kind of did; the probes we sent were perhaps not sterilized well enough. [nbcnews.com]
Billions of tons of organisms (Score:2)
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Nope. Oil is too concentrated a source of carbon. And many of these organisms are living in igneous rock, which is notoriously bereft of oil. It's possible that some oil deposits were modified by these organisms, but the carbon came from surface sediments.
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I'm trying to sort out your argument, it's not easy. You propose that all the carbon in oil comes from surface sediments because it is too concentrated to be otherwise? I don't see how this explains how the carbon came to be concentrated in the first place.
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These bugs live in different sorts of rocks than where you find oil.
In recent years igneous reservoirs have become an important new field of oil exploration. [wikipedia.org] Igneous reservoirs make up roughly 5 percent. [seg.org]
These igneous reservoirs are thought to be formed by leakage from nearby sedimentary formations, but could that be wrong?
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The first thought that occurred to me as well. Until now, the debate has been about abiogenic [wikipedia.org] vs
fossil [energyeducation.ca] origin of oil. But now, questions can be raised about surface vs subsurface biology. Like you, I was taught in school that coal comes from ancient forests of ferns and oil from ancient algae, but how did all that carbon arrive on the surface in the first place?
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Surface-dwelling plants get their carbon from the air (CO2).
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Right. There is about 4 orders of magnitude more carbon in the crust than the atmosphere, and maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude less biomass in the crust. It seems like a significant amount of potential methane production to me.
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but how did all that carbon arrive on the surface in the first place?
Volcanoes, they put out CO2 and there used to be a lot more. To give an idea of how much can be out gassed over billions of years on an Earth sized planet, look at Venus.
The difference is that the Earth has multiple ways of sequestering carbon, plants, silicate weathering are the main two, along with tectonic plates getting sucked back into the mantle along with all the coal, oil, limestone etc.
Now that we know about it... (Score:1)
the diversity of underworld species bears comparison to the Amazon or the Galapagos Islands, but unlike those places the environment is still largely pristine because people have yet to probe most of the subsurface.
As long as there are no exploitable resources it should be fine. But if someone discovers something useful or that can be sold, it won't take long before we humans manage to lay waste to most of it. Sadly that seems to be the way we operate as a species. We've just gotten very efficient at it as we advance.
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As long as there are no exploitable resources it should be fine. But if someone discovers something useful or that can be sold, it won't take long before we humans manage to lay waste to most of it. Sadly that seems to be the way we operate as a species. We've just gotten very efficient at it as we advance.
Agreed. +1
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She prefers to be called Gia.
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There are more errors in this summary than there are stars in the universe.
Is this Gold's "Deep Hot Biosphere" theory? (Score:3)
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You beat me to the post!
So while some of the oilfields may be decomposed dinosaurs, it's looking much more likely that Gold was right and hydrocarbons are the output of actual organisms. Wild stuff.
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Err, decomposed dinosaurs? And dinosaurs are not actual organisms?
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We have a big thick coal band from the Carboniferous period. We have oil wells found where ancient shallow seas did once reside.
So while I would not conclude Gold is entirely wrong, we need an explanation for why the oil and coal is not found in a very different pattern from the observed real world, in order to accept Gold's theory.
FYI: I think the idea that life was first created in warm porous rocks (and/or similar) to be likely true.
Weight Gap (Score:1)
We must compete with the mass of this life or be overwhelmed. We can make more humans, or eat more pizza and burgers. I have more experience with the second.
Re: Weight Gap (Score:3)
We'll close the gap twice as fast if we eat the subterranean organisms, hope they found something tasty...
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Bullies made me eat dirt as a kid. I don't remember liking it.
Russians? (Score:2)
Relocation (Score:4, Funny)