The harshest places on Earth … and often finding it. We seem to find life everywhere on Earth, nowhere else.
From PBS:
Before Northeast Natural Energy can send down fluid to fracture the Marcellus Shales, buried more than 1.5 miles below the surface for 400 million years, Wrighton, Wilkins, and a team of scientists will be collecting rock samples hauled up from the deep.
They might find life:.
The discovery that microbes could live in environments far more extreme than anyone suspected opened a wide range of habitats to microbial exploration. While some scientists explored the frigid, windswept deserts of Antarctica, others, like Bo Barker Jørgensen and Karsten Pedersen, geomicrobiologists at Aarhus University in Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, respectively, began taking advantage of burgeoning surveys of marine life. Part of these surveys included sampling sediments at the bottom of the ocean or deep underground, which Jørgensen, Pedersen, and others found teeming with life. “It took a decade to accept that life was actually that deep,” Pedersen says.
“Once you’re a few meters deep or so, it’s certainly a different world than on the surface.”
These first studies, in the mid-1980s, showed that deep subsurface life can exist. Still, despite decades of work on the subject, there’s no formal definition of what “deep” really means, says Tori Hoehler, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Science Center.
“From the NASA perspective, the deep subsurface means that you’ve gone deep enough to escape the influence of the surface biosphere,” Hoehler says. “I’m not sure there’s a strict dividing line, but once you’re a few meters deep or so, it’s certainly a different world than on the surface.”
Interesting:
One result of this high-stress, low-energy environment is that many of the microbes found far belowground divide much less frequently. The famous bacterium Escherichia coli can divide in less than 20 minutes in nutrient-rich growth media. Onstott believes that some of the microbes he has found in the South African gold mines might have doubling times in the decades, centuries, or even millennia. As a result, their numbers are likely going to be much lower than microbes found on the surface, simply because they can’t reproduce as quickly. More.
See also: What we know and don’t, about the origin of life
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