DEEP BIOSPHERE

Recent study:

On the eve of the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory today reported several transformational discoveries, including how much and what kinds of life exist in the deep subsurface.

Among many key discoveries and insights are:

• The deep biosphere constitutes a world that can be viewed as a sort of "subterranean Galapagos" and includes members of all three domains of life:
  • Bacteria,
    
    
  • archaea (microbes with no membrane-bound nucleus), and
    
    
  • eukarya (microbes or multicellular organisms with cells that contain a nucleus as well as membrane-bound organelles)
    
    
  
  
  
• Two types of microbes—bacteria and archaea—dominate Deep Earth. About 70% of Earth's bacteria and archaea live in the subsurface
  
  
• Among these microbes, there are millions of distinct types, most yet to be discovered or characterized known as "Dark Matter".
  
  
• Deep microbes are often very different from their surface cousins.
  
  
• The genetic diversity of life below the surface is comparable to or exceeds that above the surface.
  
  
• 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.