This mysterious new ecosystem is being called the ‘subterranean Galápagos’ and it’s almost twice the size of Earth’s oceans. We’ve never seen anything like it.
Thumbnail image courtesy of Gaëtan Borgonie, ELI, Belgium.
A New Genetic Alphabet Is Creating Things Nature Has Never Seen -
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Life in Deep Earth Totals 15 to 23 Billion Tonnes of Carbon—Hundreds of Times More than Humans
“The absolute limits of life on Earth in terms of temperature, pressure, and energy availability have yet to be found. The records continually get broken. A frontrunner for Earth’s hottest organism in the natural world is Geogemma barossii, a single-celled organism thriving in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Its cells, tiny microscopic spheres, grow and replicate at 121 degrees Celsius (21 degrees hotter than the boiling point of water)”
Weird Organisms Emerge From The Deep, Dark Biosphere
“The analysis has revealed some known microbes and many completely unstudied ones. Many of these mystery microbes are very small cells, with small genomes laced with unfamiliar genes. “Fifty per cent of the genes in these genomes have no known function,” says Banfield – an unusually high proportion.”
The Biomass And Biodiversity Of The Continental Subsurface
“Using our updated continental subsurface cellular estimate and existing literature, we estimate that the total global prokaryotic biomass is approximately 23 to 31 Pg of carbon C (PgC), roughly 4 to 10 times less than previous estimates.”
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