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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.
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
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.
Humans (which I am one)
You KNOW you're hanging out at the wrong forum when someone has to preface their comment with THAT.
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
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