Odd Life-forms Found Deep Inside Mine
Extreme microbes have been found thriving deep inside Kidd Mine in Canada in a water reservoir said to be undisturbed for two billion years.
Geologists from the University of Toronto recently discovered the single-celled sulfur-breathing organisms, which need neither oxygen or sunlight.
Instead they nourish themselves on chemicals in the surrounding rocks– pyrite or fool’s good.
The new finding adds to the growing list of similar microbes found in such places as volcanic vents on the ocean’s surface. In fact, one geobiology report from a Swiss team estimates that five-hundred-thousand-trillion-trillion cells live inside the deep Earth, with a weight of more than 300 times all living people.
Scientists are starting to find similar microbes in other deep spots, including boreholes, volcanic vents on the bottom of the ocean and buried sediments far beneath the seafloor.
“The deep microbial realm reveals a biosphere that’s more extensive, resilient, varied and strange than we had realized,” said Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, and co-founder of Deep Carbon Observatory, a global project to study the deep biosphere.
Cut off from light, air, and any connection to the surface, this shadowy realm seems more like an alien world than part of Earth. Hazen said exploring it could help us understand how life might have begun on other planets as well as on our own. We might even find alien-like creatures living undetected right beneath our feet.
More at NBC News.
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