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Life Found In Deepest Layer of Earth's Crust
michaelmarshall writes "For the first time, life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different from the bacteria in the layers above; they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle."
This got me thinking an interesting idea.
Why don't humans populate more of the inner earth? Sure, most people don't like the environment just like that, but you can build it. Make fake environments. In the end, they will look and feel natural too. You can also easily get rid of gasses and other pollution problem by dumping them upwards.
And if you go deep enough, who owns the land? Can you start a new country like lets say, 50 kilometers below surface?
yet again, life is ubiquitous.
Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs. If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
if not, it should be Bacillus Balrogus
"The humans dug too greedily and deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of the Chilean copper mine... shadow and flame... and Bacillus Balrogus!"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
on the plus side ...
it is likely humans can't make it extinct
It amazes me that people don't believe there's no life elsewhere in the universe when we're still discovering it in new forms here at home, with new ways of doing things, in new seemingly impossible places. I for one welcome our new microbial hydrocarbon munching leaders.
:)
How is it these guys can be drilling again?
"...Tom Wilson and the entire Shell organization bent over backward to release seismic, well, drilling, and geotechnical data. Shell employees generously shared their time to help design a safe and effective drilling program. The scientists, engineers, and lawyers of Shell, Amerada Hess, and British Petroleum worked together to achieve scientific drilling within industry lease blocks."
http://publications.iodp.org/proceedings/308/acknow.htm
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Now if only we could find intelligent life in Washington D.C.
Mole men. Thank you very much Mr. Assumer.
Let's drill and see if anyone becomes a Primord :)
"The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect"
Actually that is very unexpected! Archaea dominate in oceans and sediments, not bacteria. This find is very surprising!
Yeah, amazing ; ).
But, perhaps more importantly, is there life elsewhere NOW?
Space is but one dimension in the space-time continuum.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Menzoberranzan?
Of course not, because if they had, they'd never come back.
What is the point of the bacteria there and what would happen if it was not there?
...I'm guessing that archaea are pretty well represented down there as well...
BEHOLD! The lowly bacteria that gave rise to life within our Hollow Earth and eventually spawned our future overlords, the Mole People.
...can we grill it?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Space is but one dimension in the space-time continuum.
Hmm. I could swear that space had 3 dimensions?
Radiation could be an issue, depending on what's in the local rock.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
For dining and dancing enjoyment, here's a list of references for Abiogenic oil.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Philboyd Studge
how this finding will affect the abiogenic hypothesis for petroleum.
U R right of course,
"Space is but three of the dimensions et al".
My point was more along the lines of "We'll likely find ancient remains or organisms such as described in the article, not life as we know it".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Did it have horns and a tail?
You seem to miss the part where TFA notes that bacteria found deep in the crust degrade the hydrocarbons, which are produced by abiotic processes. That's pretty much the opposite of having an oil supply made from bacteria.
Setting up underground cities a la Asimov is a little pricey. These things would effectively be buried space stations whose only advantages are built-in gravity and no worries about radiation or meteor strikes. You'd have to provide air conditioning, fresh air, food, clean water, not to mention the cost of just getting the things built.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
at least
welcome our new subterranean underlords.
Watch out for the HFS (Hidden Fun Stuff) http://bay12games.com/dwarves/
when all the oil lubricating it is removed. The earth will come to a screeching halt. That's what.
Since archaea (the oldest life forms) were absent in the layer where these life forms were found, it suggests that there was a "second creation" of life. If so, they should have a separate form of DNA (or the equivalent). . . .
Does it think we are tasty? And are our immune systems up to fending it off?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
It's an opportunity!
Before we can properly investigate the ecosystem of this bacteria, let's genetically engineer bacteria that DOES produce oil-like hyrdocarbons from inner-earth energy and substances, and seed the inner earth to provide us with sustainable oil "indefinitely", and to eventually kill us because we destroyed something vital that we didn't yet understand (and that kept us filling the atmosphere with CO2).
This is what market forces are all about!
Speak for yourselves. I'm waiting for them to find a Balrog.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
...asked of political pundits: "How low can they go?"
Bacteria have been found in the deepest holes drilled fro petroleum prospecting. The temperature has to be below 120C however. This is sedimentary rock where the bacteria was probably buried at the same time the sediments were deposited.
The rock in this article was igneous rock. Its more difficult to figure out how bacteria got so deep in that kind of rock.
They are eating all of our hydrocarbons!
or
It's not man's fault for Global Warming, it's the damned oil-eating bacteria.
What you really want to do is make sure there is a direct path from the carnival to your booze stockpile. The clowns just want to get drunk.
...if you use that space to hoard more weapons and ammunition than the people who do have the water and food. Plus you'll need somewhere to put all the corpses.
Thomas Gold would be proud.
I believe, that in our lifetime, evidence of life is going to be found on one of the planets of our solar system, and that we will have confirmation that 'life' is prevalent throughout the universe.
Growth of bacteria deep within the earth's crust is well known, as is growth of bacteria near the boiling point of water>br> HOwever, as you go deep into the earth, temperature rises, so one might ask, is there an upper temperature limit to life ?
In (I think) the '90s, Nature magazine (for profit; does a lot of sensational science) published a paper on bacteria that thrived at some very high temp; I think it was 200oC, but in any event, well over 100oC (boiling point of water at room pressure)
As you may know, all know life forms require proteins as fundamental components; if you look at proteins from the view point of organic chemistry, you find that they have a lot of things called "amide bonds", and that cleavage of said bonds often leads to inactive protein (tech note - altho not always, split proteins like lac alpha etc etc...)
Anyway, after the 1st nature paper, a few months later someone publishes a paper on the stability of the amide bond vs temp; bonds have a half life of a few minutes around 200oC
The upshot is, life as we know it probably has an upper limit for growth around 120 - 150oC; growth at higher temps is going to require something really different
Rah rah rah BOOM di yay,
Booze will explode that way
Dwarf parts will fly away
Clowns will be here to stay.
Bacteria can't survive at anywhere near the temperatures achieved in the mantle. Certain bacteria can survive up to ~120C or so. The mantle is easily 800-1000C. The speculation that they might be in the mantle is nonsense and is not the least bit supported by this paper, where the in-situ measured temperature was "14 to 102C" (check in the methods section).
It amazes me that you can't concieve of the possibility that this is the first planet in the galaxy for life to have formed.
While it is technically possible, it seems astronomically unlikely considering the size and age of this galaxy. Our sun is not even a first generation star. First life in the galaxy should have occurred billions of years before our solar system even formed.
We haven't found any evidence of it anywhere else, and it's not from lack of looking.
It most certainly is from lack of looking. So far in all of human history, all we have done is a decent (not perfect) job of looking on the moon, and made a half-assed attempt at checking a few square feet of mars (if it was teeming with life we wouldn't have missed it, but we hardly checked exhaustively). 99.99999.... % of the galaxy is still left completely unexplored. We don't have enough data to even think about making conclusions about the prevalence of life in our own solar system, let alone the rest of the galaxy.
Titan and Europa are good candidates. If we don't find any there, we may not find any anywhere.
Yes, they are good candidates for carbon-based "life like us". Given the spectroscopy results of Titan's atmosphere, I would actually be surprised if we didn't find at least simple bacteria-like life there.
However, I am certain there is more than one basic path to "life" in this universe (even in this galaxy). We arrogantly assume that other life must function in a similar manner to us, so we only bother to even consider looking in environments vaguely similar to ours for life vaguely similar to us. There may well be life on Venus, or even Mercury, or the surface of the sun, or hanging out in the Oort cloud (just not anything remotely similar to Earth life). Even our science fiction does a piss-poor job of exploring this concept.
Knowledge != Intelligence
Actually, it does. If you're replenishing the oil using food sources from above ground, there'd be a minimal impact on global warming. The carbon would come from the atmosphere and go back.
Except that we're currently doing our dead level best to burn hundreds of million years of accumulated oil in a few scant centuries.
Keep in mind that our current worrisome CO2 problems are with CO2 going about 400 ppm. The Earth's atmosphere has only sunk to those low levels of CO2 needed to sustain the climate we survive on in the Neogene period when it was at 280 ppm in pre-industrial times. Kick back 500 million years to the Cambrian period, and you're looking at 4500 ppm and sea levels 200 m over modern day levels. If we only hit a mere 500 ppm, we're looking at CO2 levels not seen since the Paleogene over 20 million years ago.
Unless we can find a way to sequester carbon millions of times faster than it naturally turns into oil, we're not going to make it up by wasting cropland on throwing food down a hole.
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