Posted on 06/02/2011 10:38:04 AM PDT by Fractal Trader
For the first time, scientists have found complex, multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface, raising new possibilities about the spread of life on Earth and potential subsurface life on other planets and moons.
Nicknamed “worms from hell,” the nematodes, or roundworms, were found in several gold mines in South Africa, where researchers have also made breakthrough discoveries about deep subterranean single-cell life.
The two lead researchers, Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent in Belgium and Tullis Onstott of Princeton University, said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding “Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.”
“This is telling us something brand new,” said Onstott, whose pioneering work in South Africa over the past decade has revolutionized the understanding of microbial life known generally as extremophiles, which live in places long believed to be uninhabitable.
“For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable,” he said.
An article introducing the subterranean nematodes, one of which was formally named Halicephalobus mephisto after the “Lord of the Underworld,” appears in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature. H. mephisto was found in water flowing from a borehole about one mile below the surface in the Beatrix gold mine.
The research is likely to trigger scientific challenges and cause some controversy because it places far more complex life in an environment where researchers have generally held it should not, or even cannot, exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
ping
“Worms from Hell”?
Is there not one place US government bureaucrats don’t infest?
“For the first time, scientists have found complex, multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface...”
Oh for Pete’s sake, leave those poor bug alone and let then do what they do best. Living high on methane and making (gasp) crude oil.
Tremors!!
This is all such a load of crap; more junk science from the Journal Nature and now on made up stuff from gold mines in South Africa. Really.
‘their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched’ (Mark 9:43-44,46,48)
Not another Weiner thread.......................
Some DDT will take care of that...............
for coverage of soft-bellied spineless worms you can always count on The Washington Post
"You can't drill, there might be rare endangered hellworms..."
bttt
Fishbait!
But there absolutely HAS to be extraterrestrial life in order to prove that life evolved instead of being created here.
“This is all such a load of crap; more junk science from the Journal Nature and now on made up stuff from gold mines in South Africa. Really.”
OK. Please elaborate if you have data to refute this.
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