One would think without even ever having heard of H.P. Lovecraft’s cryptozoologic tales of ancient, maleficent, inhuman and utterly incomprehensibly mad creatures awakening from beneath miles of strata under the south-east asian ocean floor, one would think that whatever could be found alive down there, even microbes, would have to be hellish, if not plainly weird. However, in sediments over 2 kilometers below the ocean floor, where pressure and heat are equally hellish, researchers have unearthed the very first samples of microbes. Surprisingly, there’s nothing extraordinary about them. The cells discovered are not different in appearance than microbes living in more quotidian environs, like forest soil.
MICROBES’ UBIQUITOUS THRIVING
It is true that mircroorganisms are among the most resilient forms of life, thriving everywhere from deep beneath the tomb of the seas beneath Antarctic ice to springs hot enough to liquify a mammal in minutes. But what are their limits? How unforgiving and brutal does an environment need to be before microbes die? Researchers still don’t know, as they’ve detected chemical life signs from 4 kilometers below the floor of the ocean.
MICROBES FROM BEFORE TIME
In this search for new hells to dwell in, an international team of researchers drilled over 2400 meters down off the coast of northeast Japan. Co-author Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, a biogeochemist at the University of Bremen in Germany mentioned that roughly 23 million years ago this place was actually coastal, sporting the sort of low lagoons and wetlands that we still enjoy in present Florida. However, he added that this area gradually sank due to continental drift, and eventually became covered by sediment. These days these layers are smothered in coal.
SCIENTIFIC RIGOUR
Many precautions had to be taken in order to minimize the possibility of contaminating microbes from collected samples. On board a drilling ship, the researchers meticulously scanned the sediment cores with an x-ray CT scanner , choosing only the most solid samples. Only the middle of these hardest cores were removed for testing.
PRELIMINARY FINDINGS
Yesterday these researchers reported to Science that their cross-analysis showed the presence of microbes in samples from even the deepest sediments, measuring about 2466 meters under the ocean floor. A cubic centimeter of this tough stuff tested positive for somewhere between 10 and 10,000 individual microbial cells. Comparatively, Hinrichs added, the same volume of backyard dirt would nest billions of microorganisms. “There is life, but there is very little life,” in such wretched depths.
