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Posted on 06/12/2008 1:00:33 AM PDT by neverdem
Some weeks ago, I wrote about microbes in the air and their possible role in helping clouds form, in causing rain and in altering the chemistry of the high atmosphere. This week, I want to go in the opposite direction and plunge down into the earth. For many bacteria live deep in the oceans and deep in the earth, far from light, far from what we normally think of as good, comfortable places to live.
For example: the bottom of the Mariana Trench. This is a seam on the sea floor in the northwestern Pacific, not far from the island of Guam; it’s where the Pacific plate is sliding under the Philippine plate. The ocean is deeper here than anywhere else in the world: the seabed is 11 kilometers (almost 7 miles) below the surface of the sea. Yet even here, where the pressure of the water would crush you or me, there are bacteria. Some of them won’t grow at all unless the atmospheric pressure is at least 50 megapascals (around 7,000 pounds per square inch), and they grow better if the pressure is greater — 70 megapascals (more than 10,000 pounds per square inch). For comparison, the pressure at sea level — the pressure we have evolved to bear — is 700 times less.
Then there are the “intraterrestrials” — the organisms that live in rocks deep in the earth, the creatures of the “deep subsurface biosphere.” Bacteria have been found in rock samples taken several hundred meters below the sea floor, even when the sea floor itself is 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) below sea level. We don’t know how many organisms are living in this (to us) alien environment. But based on what’s been found in rock samples so far, the numbers are likely to be...
(Excerpt) Read more at judson.blogs.nytimes.com ...
weird/wild micro ping
Who knows what critters are down there?
The only beef I have with this article is the use of the therm “magnetic signal”, it would have been more correct to call it “magnetic flux”.
Is any attempt made to decontaminate oil drilling equipment between uses? I know that aquifers can be contaminated by iron bacteria introduced by water well drilling. Could some of the bacteria in deep reservoirs have been conveyed from shallower levels by the drills? (Somewhat similar to drug addicts getting AIDS or hepatitis from reused needles)
The equipment used to drill surface sits out in the open during the rest of the hole. On large, oilwell drilling rigs, that means they are exposed to air which kills most anerobes. The rest of the drill string (at least around) here is commonly in saturated salt mud or diesel based invert mud (an 80/20 diesel/saturated salt water emulsion).
Pit water is monitored for bacteria and biocides run in the drilling fluid if any are detected. That way the pumps, mud tanks, pits, wellbore, and drilling equipment all get purged.
The shallower ("surface" hole--as deep as 5000 ft.) is cased prior to drilling the rest of the hole to protect near surface aquifers, and the drilling fluid changed from fresh water/native mud to a saturated salt water or invert drilling fluid afterwards. Not much chance for a critter which does well in one environment to survive in the other.
The field I cited was most likely contaminated by frac fluid hauled in a truck which had either hauled sour salt water to a disposal well or sour crude. Usually, water/salt water/ disposal water/crude oil haulers and the like haul the same fluids consistently, and do not mix what goes into the truck from load to load.
Over the life of the field, the difference in price has cost the operators millions because the sour crude is worth less than it would have been if it stayed sweet, so bacterial monitoring is a cheap form of insurance.
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Thanks neverdem.[M]any bacteria live deep in the oceans and deep in the earth, far from light, far from what we normally think of as good, comfortable places to live... the bottom of the Mariana Trench... 11 kilometers (almost 7 miles) below the surface of the sea... there are bacteria. Some of them won't grow at all unless the atmospheric pressure is at least 50 megapascals (around 7,000 pounds per square inch), and they grow better if the pressure is greater -- 70 megapascals (more than 10,000 pounds per square inch). For comparison, the pressure at sea level -- the pressure we have evolved to bear -- is 700 times less.Thomas Gold-related. |
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Think they did some drilling in Sweden and pulled up solid rock cores from some 25,000 feet or so.
Solid rock cores that had bacteria in them that lived on minutes quantities of Hydrogen sulfide that was able to filter through the rocks.
Amazing!
That’s why I always chuckle a bit when someone talks about killing all the life on Earth.
Heck, short of a 30 meagaton bomb going off 500 feet over your head, it’d be near impossible to wipe out all the life that lives on a regular city block!
And odds are that a good number of the cockroaches there would get through it with little more than a mild sunburn anyways!
I remember an anecdote regarding the Bikini atoll islands, where the US conducted atmospheric tests, including some (H-bomb) which started out buried in the coral “bedrock” and vaporized at least one of the islands (there’s just a submerged stump left). When the US Navy went back some years after the last tests, men on deck could see the rats (not lookin’ healthy, but they were alive and hungry) coming down to the shore to meet the boats. ;’)
Microbes May Thrive Under Pressure"Carnegie Institute scientists Anurag Sharma and James Scott found that E. coli remained viable, despite being squeezed with pressure exceeding 16 thousand times that found at sea level. This means the bacteria could endure pressure conditions like those found 31 miles (50 kilometers) below Earth's crust and perhaps much deeper below the surface of an alien ocean. Previously, scientists believed that only highly specialized organisms, called extremophiles, could thrive in such intense conditions."
by W. B. Schomaker
LOL! Thanks for the link.
Microbes?!
I thought intraterrestrials was about Morlochs and Eloi...
> LOL!
I’ve got a million of ‘em.
The Shadow knows...
Ground-based bacteria may be making it rain
New Scientist | Jan 12, 2008 | Devin Powell
Posted on 01/12/2009 5:36:30 PM PST by decimon
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