Slashdot Mirror
Life Confirmed At Extreme Depths
SEWilco writes "A few years ago the life forms around deep-ocean thermal vents were a surprise. Now ancient bacteria alive in rock 2 miles down have been found. The story is in the San Francisco Chronicle. It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects. Other bacteria survived frozen in the pressures of an ocean 100 miles deep. This increases the known limits of where life can exist on any planet. Thomas Gold undoubtedly is not surprised at hot, deep bacteria living on hydrogen."
It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects.
Life always finds a way to survive. Now, evolution has provided us with a website that can anticipate and avoid the slashdot effect.
OK, before we all jump on that "ocean 100 miles deep" claim (as I was about to do), here's the actual quote from the article:
Other bacteria, frozen into chunks of ice in a Washington laboratory, have thrived inside a high-pressure container and went right on reproducing after they were exposed to pressures equivalent to life at the bottom of an ocean 100 miles deep.
So they aren't really claiming to have found oceans 100 miles deep.
OK, let me get this out right now: OK, we have life way way down in our earth. That only proves that life as we know it can exist in that extreme of an environment. Comparing that to other planet's life forms or using that as evidence to further any point of extra terrestrial life is very much redundant; life elsewhere could be (and probably is) completely different from ours. Maybe no DNA. maybe no amino acids. Maybe their amino acids are left handed, who knows. But point being: this proves nothing that wasn't proven to any thinking person before.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
"Life Confirmed At Extreme Depths"
For some reason I thought this story was going to be about Slashdot.
It's amazing how basic lifeforms can adapt and evolve to thier surroundings. There is also a small cave in the area around the arctic that scientists found that was esentially a bubble inside solid rock, it was found by accident.
It had inside it a small ecosystem with insect life that had evolved completely isolated from the outside world. None of the species had eyes because of the pitch black inside the bubble. Nor did they have any coloring at all, they were all translucent. Unfortunatly I only saw this on a documentry, but the transcript is online.
Link is hereBe you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
This means that life as we know it has an even greater potential to be living in some of the extreme enviornments found on nearby planets. Not so much a tie-in or comparison to possible life elsewhere in the universe as it is a statement that Earth life and life like it is proven to be this much more resilient.
No this isn't flamebait...
Humans (which I am one) tend to view the world through a very narrow perspective. We see things on the terms which we live within. Our existance is within a small thin band of possible environments.
I mean does anyone seriously think that all that oil in the ground came from prehistoric vegetation?? This rock we call home is literally infested with life to the core (well to the mantle atleast).
With this new realization, is there any doubt that there exists life on other planets?
--
Uh, RTFA?
-- Other bacteria, frozen into chunks of ice in a Washington laboratory, have thrived inside a high-pressure container and went right on reproducing after they were exposed to pressures equivalent to life at the bottom of an ocean 100 miles deep.
Oh, right. Forgot that no one reads the article anymore...
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
American Geophysical Union Meeting,
San Francisco, December, 2002
Goldmine yields clues for life on Mars
Radioactive bacteria live deep in the Earth - and maybe elsewhere.
9 December 2002
TOM CLARKE
Mine dwelling bacteria may be similar to the first life on Earth
© GettyImages
There are tiny creatures living off radiation in ancient pockets of water several kilometres beneath the Earth's surface, say researchers.
The microbes seem to have been isolated for hundreds of millions of years. Similar conditions might exist beneath the surface of Mars.
"Anywhere you have a crust with uranium and water in it, you have the potential for life," microbiologist Tullis Onstott, of Princeton University, New Jersey, told this week's American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
As you go deeper, the chemicals essential for normal life - organic matter and oxygen - disappear. And you get crushed and cooked, as temperature and pressure rise.
Microbes have been found a kilometre or so beneath the Earth's surface before. But cost and contamination with shallower bugs have hindered scientists looking deeper for life.
Working with miners in the world's deepest holes - 3.5 kilometre-deep South African goldmines - Onstott and his colleagues found hot water rich in bacteria.
The water is loaded with dissolved hydrogen gas, at a concentration up to a hundred million times higher than normal. Radioactive isotopes in the water show that the gas could only have formed by radioactive energy from surrounding uranium deposits splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen, argues Onstott.
Researchers had speculated that bacteria might make hydrogen in this way, but it has never been seen before. "It's a completely novel system for supporting life," says John Baross, who studies deep-sea bacteria at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The mine-dwelling bacteria are hard to grow in the lab. Genetic evidence suggests that some of the microbes are related to a species called Pyrococcus abyssi, which lives in hot, deep-sea vents.
These bacteria are thought to be similar to the first life on Earth. They use hydrogen and sulphur to survive without oxygen.
Other genetic sequences of microbes in the mine water are unlike those of any other species. Onstott says that he would not be surprised if the mine contained new species with new types of metabolism.
Radioactive dating by Onstott's colleagues suggests that some pockets of mine water have been isolated for several hundred million years. "The dinosaurs came and went while this water has been down there," he says.
If the microbes can be grown and their workings probed, they should provide new insights into primitive life, Baross adds.
Missions to Mars could look for life by sniffing for hydrogen seeping up from deep in the planet's crust, says Onstott. Mars has some water and uranium, although less than Earth.
© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002
Didn't they make a movie (or ten, plus a few X-Files episodes) about this:
The food supply is so sparse that the bugs reproduce maybe only once in a thousand, or perhaps even a million years. That means organisms the scientists are seeing today have had little opportunity to change since the earliest history of life on earth.
Allow me to be the first to put a paranoid spin on the whole issue... where a microbe has lain nearly dormant for 65 million years, living on the odd hydrogen atom, patiently waiting for its chance to do for humankind what it did for the dinosaurs. Nobody is safe this time!
Ok, now that I've exercised my paranoia... I'll calm myself with the knowledge that any bug that has evolved to metabolize the odd hydrogen atom would probably burn up (metabolically speaking) in a highly corrosive atmosphere, such as one containing a whopping 20% oxygen.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Could this be a landmark case of quantum theory manifesting itself in our macroscopic world? No, I'm not talking about the bacteria, let me quote from above:
> It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects.
Effect preceeding Cause -- a server going down just *before* being Slashdotted. What's next, "first posts" before the topic is up? Stories repeated before they're posted in the first place? Dogs and cats living together?!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Jules Verne wrote of life way beneath the surface of the Earth!!
Geez... some news flash... it's only 131 years late!
Great Breakdown of Chemosynthesis.
Quick image summary of chemosynthesis for the bored.
Microbes thrive in the harshest environments Research findings give scientists hope of discovering life on planets
Scientists pondering the possibility of life on distant planets have discovered colonies of earthly microbes thriving in more extreme environments than any they have found before.
-- Bacteria are busily reproducing in the total darkness of water- bearing rocks 2 1/2 miles deep inside a South African gold mine, where the rocks themselves have apparently been isolated from the outside atmosphere for about 400 million years.
-- Other bacteria, frozen into chunks of ice in a Washington laboratory, have thrived inside a high-pressure container and went right on reproducing after they were exposed to pressures equivalent to life at the bottom of an ocean 100 miles deep.
The search for these hardy microbes on Earth -- known to science as "extremophiles" -- has been a high-priority project for NASA space planners, whose unmanned planetary probes have already been seeking evidence of life on Mars as well as Europa and other ice-covered moons of Jupiter.
DEEP PROBE
And the NASA spacecraft called Cassini, now on its way to explore the ringed planet Saturn, will be sending a probe deep beneath the thick atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn's major satellites, to learn whether some form of life -- or at least life's essential chemicals -- might lie on that mystery moon's surface.
Scientists have long been wondering just what kind of life they might expect and what kind of unearthly conditions such living organisms might be able to withstand.
Until now, researchers in NASA's Astrobiology Institute, whose headquarters are at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and also at the nearby independent SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute have speculated, theorized and experimented with various concepts for life in extreme environments.
Other scientists have already found microbes thriving in deep mines, in the boiling waters of Yellowstone's geysers, in the sub-zero dry valleys of Antarctica, in the saltiest of brines and the driest of deserts far from any water at all.
At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week, where nearly 10,000 scientists have gathered to report research in every discipline from space physics to seismology to oceanography, some of the scientists were reporting on the possible conditions for life in outer space.
BACTERIA IN DEEPEST MINES
Tullis C. Onstott , a Princeton University geologist reported on the international team that found the bacteria living in the bottom of the deepest gold mines in South Africa.
The mines' rock formations, Onstott said, are about 2.7 million years old, and vast quantities of salt water circulate through them at temperatures of about 135 degrees Fahrenheit.
The scientists drilled boreholes into the blackness of fracture zones in the rocks at the bottom of those mines to obtain more than 100 samples of water and gas, and they found bacteria there thriving on enormous concentrations of hydrogen that provided them with energy for growth, Onstott said.
In another report from the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, Anurag Sharma described the "interesting effects on cellular physiology" that he and his colleagues at the institute observed during their experiments with two species of bacteria under high pressure.
INHABITANT OF HUMAN GUT
One species was the common Escherichia coli , well known as an inhabitant of the human gut, and the other was Shewanella oneidensis, which the Department of Energy hopes to use in its efforts to clean up uranium from contaminated wastes at the old World War II Hanford reactor sites in Washington state.
Both species, Sharma said, were exposed to extremely high pressures inside the water cores of ice blocks and continued healthily reproducing after the ice was thawed and the pressure was reduced to normal.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
The complete write up is here. The Mariana Trench is a fairly large subduction feature; the Challenger Deep being the deepest point.
BTW, 35,813 / 5,280 = 6.7827 miles (which would be somewhat shy of 24).
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
At this point, it seems pretty clear that life is a pretty common phenomenon. The only ingredients that are seemingly necessary are water, and carbon. These are ingredients that are spread throughout the universe in vast quantities.
Some day soon, they will finally find bacteria on someplace like europa and we can put to rest any question that there is life out there. The conditions needed to support basic life are pretty minimal. The basic requirements for intellgient life are an entirely different matter. Can a civilization be built around hot thermal vents or two miles deep in ice?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Human beings seem to be hung on the idea that living in high pressure environments is an amazing thing simply because we can not do it.
Human life depends heavily on gaseous exchanges, which behave differently at different pressures. Since liquids and solids are hardly compressible, it seems like a no-brainer that organisms that do not rely on gaseous exchanges can reamin intact perfectly well in extremely high pressures.
I would have been more surprised if they had been destroyed.
The oil they're pushing up at us is part of a deliberate plot.
With an infinite supply of oil, we'll soon burn out way into a cataclysmic Greenhouse Effect that will turn the Earth into a moist version of Venus, allowing them to colonize the surface.
You've been warned!
Stefan
This is another argument in favor of extra-terrestrial life. IMHO, it is very likely there's life out there. However, it could be so radically different than ours that not only it would be pretty much impossible for "us" to communicate with "them", but also we wouldn't even recognize each other as life!
"Houston, we are landing on big rock number one, as planned... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... contact."
(Days later)
"Ok, Houston, we are ready to depart. Our tests show no signs of life. We are coming back."
(One hundred years later)
"Ouch! Mom, I think something just scratched my back."
(Two hundres years later)
"Hmm, I don't see anything. You've probably just imagined it. Come on dear, it's time for your nap. I'll wake you up in 360 millenia, when dinner is ready."
/* TAANSTAFL */
Pressure effects are not just seen in gaseous exchanges, but with gaseous cavities. Boyles law gives us the volume reduction with pressure of an ideal gas, and that is what makes scuba diving so difficult for humans. Fish use a gas bladder to regulate boyancy, which is why deep species often burst when you catch them and haul them to the surface. Bacteria or any other species (including fish using gaseous exchange) generally don't have problems with deep sea pressures. The problems mostly come with the change in pressure, not the steady application of it over time. That is adapted to.
It seems like people aren't really differentiating between two different lines of research going on here. I was actually at the AGU session where this research was presented, so I know. One involved finding bacteria at extreme depths in SA gold mines, which is being discussed a lot. In the other one, scientists working in a lab squeezed bacteria between two diamonds until the pressure was extremely high--almost three times as high as the pressure needed to turn liquid water into ice. However, in cracks in this ice a significant number of bacteria survived. In my opinion, this is particularly interesting with regards to extraterrestrial life as any environment on Mars, Europa, or Titan (the three likeliest candidates for life in our solar system) where life could be fould would probably be both icy and high-pressure.
Human life depends heavily on gaseous exchanges, which behave differently at different pressures. Since liquids and solids are hardly compressible, it seems like a no-brainer that organisms that do not rely on gaseous exchanges can reamin intact perfectly well in extremely high pressures.
I would have been more surprised if they had been destroyed.
Here's a surprise then, gas exchange is not the only process affected. One effect is that the equilibrium states of chemical reactions which alter pressure are affected (A consequence of Le Chatelier's principle). Another is that the solvent properties of water are subtly affected, causing some proteins to denature.
In fact, the effect is pronounced enough that it can be used commercially to perform pasturization (both with and without heat). Here's a link to a company called Avure which offers High Pressure Pasturization equipment.
Many will argue that even though bacteria are found living at great depths, life had to originate in the shallows of Earth's oceans where chemicals in the ocean could react with the atmosphere.
This theory is being contested, as described in this article, which claims that life may have first arisen in the depths of the ocean, sheltered in a pre-cellular state inside of iron sulphide pockets. Since life can survive beneath the surface, and if it can arise without the need for an atmosphere, then it might indeed exist almost anywhere that liquid water is present.
SEWilco writes:
"...hot, deep bacteria..."
This sounds suspiciously like some of the bizarre porn spam I get...
My
Limekiller
Important in what sense?
Firstly, even an ELE wouldn't blot out the sun COMPLETELY. Secondly, it would only do so for a relatively short period of time - after a century at most, photodensity at the equator would be up to 50% of present levels (enough to farm algae.)
Now, it is true that these chemosynthetic bacteria are a sustainable source of calories, and probably convert geothermal energy (which is where the chemicals they eat come from, in an eventual sense) to sugar at a more efficient rate than a geothermal powerplant could. So, if the earth were ripped from the sun, you might be reduced to this as an option.
However, the industrial costs to recover the buggers would be fucking immense! The technology required simply to break even on drilling up all that rock - I don't want to go there. The geysers at yellowstone don't produce surplus calories to feed very many people.
We'd be better off stockpiling glucose, or making it chemically from energy produced by nuclear / petrochemical reactors.
Secondly, in either event, write off 99.95% of the human race. Waive, chilren.
In the event of an ELE, the remnant of the human race can live on stored food, or on truly synthetic nutrients (eating electricity is what this amounts too) until the particulate level drops enough to begin farming again, less than a century if you're willing to live on strained algae.
In the event of a nuclear winter, same story except your "farms" have to be enclosed to prevent the crops from being irradiated, and they have to be on land. If the rest of the world is tenderly merciful with Australia you might be able to grow food outdoors pretty quickly, mate.
Sundry #1)
Most of these bacteria are archaebacteria. They come from the SAME great lineage of life (there are two - archaea and eubacteria) as we do, or at least as our cellular DNA. These deep dwelling bacteria are more closely related to you or I than they are to the bacteria with which most of us are familiar in our day to day lives. That's not very close - still about a billion years, give or take.
Sundry #2)
This means that although these bacteria dwell deep beneath the earth, and may very well out-mass all terrestrial life, they are DESCENDED from shallow-water dwelling organisms, just like we are. Life could adapt and survive beneath the crust of IO, but that does NOT mean that it could ARISE there.
Sundry #3)
The pressure-survivability of bacteria is a cute trick that should surprise no-one. Bacteria are just soap bubbles full of protein. Extremely TINY soap bubbles. There are three ways to kill them:
1) Pop the soap bubble. Heat can do this, or sound waves, but not pressure the likes of which can be found on earth; the soap bubble is elastic. This doesn't mean the bacteria can BREED under very high pressures (though some can) merely that high pressure won't kill them.
2) Crunch up the protein. Proteins are just chemicals, so again, heat can destroy them, but pressure can't; extremely high pressure might cause lethal aggregation of proteins but evidently it doesn't. Enough TIME will ruin the proteins.
3) Crunch up the DNA. Heat, not pressure! Vibration can do this as well. Mostly, time can be a culprit here.
So, a bacteria might survive the high pressures of being embedded inside a piece of precambrian rock, unable to reproduce. However, TIME, by way of random chemical events, would destroy the DNA inside the bacteria.
The DNA inside of any bacteria able to reproduce is maintained by evolution - but that which maintains it also changes it.
The upshot - it is impossible to recover DNA from an organism that lived millions of years ago. Sorry.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Let's see, life that never sees the sun, never takes a shower, exists without any contact with the surface world...
/.
I'll bet you 2:1 that it's probably already maxed out it's karma on
(Probably has more accepted posts than me, too.)
-Styopa