We just discovered slice “2″ is alive. |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake
Posted on 03/20/2013 8:38:08 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
File this under: What don’t we know?
We just discovered slice “2″ is alive. |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake
You might have thought that photosynthetic life forms had the Earth covered, but according to some researchers the largest ecosystem on Earth was just discovered and announced last Thursday, and it’s powered by hydrogen, not photosynthesis.
The Oceanic Crust is the rocky hard part under the mud that lies under the ocean. It covers 60% of the planet and it’s 10km thick. (The oceans themselves are a paltry 4km deep on average.) We’ve known for years that the isolated hot springs in trenches held life. But who thought that all the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of basalt rock in between had its own life cycle? Last week a group from the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark announced that they had drilled through crust that was 2.5km underwater and 55 km away from anything that mattered. They found life in the basalt.
“We’re providing the first direct evidence of life in the deeply buried oceanic crust. Our findings suggest that this spatially vast ecosystem is largely supported by chemosynthesis,” says Dr Lever, at the time a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and now a scientist at the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark.
The microorganisms we found are native to basalt,” explains Dr Lever.
Energy from reduced iron
We have learned that sunlight is a prerequisite for life on Earth. Photosynthetic organisms use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into organic material that makes up the foundation of Earth’s food chains. Life in the porous rock material in the oceanic crust is fundamentally different. Energy — and therefore life’s driving force — derives from geochemical processes.
“There are small veins in the basaltic oceanic crust and water runs through them. The water probably reacts with reduced iron compounds, such as olivine, in the basalt and releases hydrogen. Microorganisms use the hydrogen as a source of energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic material,” explains Dr Lever. “So far, evidence for life deep within oceanic crust was based on chemical and textural signatures in rocks, but direct proof was lacking,” adds Dr Olivier Rouxel of the French IFREMER institute.
It’s not just hydrogen-powered, there’s sulphate, methane, and carbon fermentation too
Even though this enormous ecosystem is probably mainly based on hydrogen, several different forms of life are found here. The hydrogen-oxidising microorganisms create organic material that forms the basis for other microorganisms in the basalt. Some organisms get their energy by producing methane or by reducing sulphate, while others get energy by breaking down organic carbon by means of fermentation.
These bugs are not the same ones in the sea water. There is no oxygen, and while they are in old rocks, they are not fossils
Dr Lever’s basalt is 3.5 million years old, but laboratory cultures show that the DNA belonging to these organisms is not fossil. “It all began when I extracted DNA from the rock samples we had brought up. To my great surprise, I identified genes that are found in methane-producing microorganisms. We subsequently analysed the chemical signatures in the rock material, and our work with carbon isotopes provided clear evidence that the organic material did not derive from dead plankton introduced by seawater, but was formed within the oceanic crust. In addition, sulphur isotopes showed us that microbial cycling of sulphur had taken place in the same rocks. These could all have been fossil signatures of life, but we cultured microorganisms from basalt rocks in the laboratory and were able to measure microbial methane production,” explains Dr Lever. Dr Jeff Alt of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor adds that “Our work proves that microbes play an important role in basalt chemistry, and thereby influence ocean chemistry.”
I’m sure the U.N. will be getting a team over there next week… I don’t think they’ve got these rocks in their models.
You’ll grow constipated, red faced, and explosively incontinent that way....
Who the f**k cares?
You got that right. During the plate tectonics some fragemnts of the oceanic plate were folded, fractured, and elevated into positions mixed with the lighter granitic crustal plates now recognized as some of the earliest surviving continental plate cratons. Having become associated with the earliest continental plates or integrated into the continental plates, these pieces of early oceanic crust escaped subduction into the mantle and remelting. These few early pieces of oceanic crustal rock can be found in conjunction with the earliest continental plate cratons in places such as Greenland, Canada, Australia, the Easterm Mediterranean Seea, and elsewhere.
Chemosynthetic life is anaerobic and therefore predates aerobic photosynthetic lifeforms. dating from their advent about 2.2 billion years ago.
That is EXACTLY what the A****** said to the heart, brain, and other organs who thought they should be the ones to decide when things were to move on....
Some of the pieces of the oceanic crust escaped being subducted back into the mantle where it would have been destroyed by remelting. Instead the fragments of the old oceanic crust became incorporated into the early continental plates where some rare examples survived weathering and destruction to the present day.
Bingo!
Awhh, the greenies getting their panties all wadded up again?
wtf?
Do be lead by such studies as you feel you are comfortable with.
No. Oil is decomposed dinosaurs, soon to be all used up.
/eyeroll
The two most abundant elements in the universe is Hydrogen and Stupidity.
And Obama is trying to cut back on the Hydrogen.
abiotic oil
dang, the Russians may yet be proven right
I figure our scientists have alreayd figured this out by the refilling of oil fields on this planets, what they are finding on Mars and elsewhere in the Galaxy, and chemical studies
BUT- it is non-PC and not acceptable to the global elites to give up their faux morality and public guilt tripping over using “fossil fuels”
I don’t understand what this is saying.
In the rock ....
In the rock ...
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.Last week a group from the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark announced that they had drilled through crust that was 2.5km underwater and 55 km away from anything that mattered. They found life in the basalt.
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Nice catch!
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