Posted on 05/24/2008 5:15:14 PM PDT by LibWhacker
It's the basement apartment like no other. Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C.
The discovery marks the deepest living cells ever to be found beneath the sea floor. Bacteria have been found deeper underneath the continents, but there they are rare. In comparison, the rocks beneath the sea appear to be teeming with life.
John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, hopes his team's discovery might one day help find life on other planets. He says it might even redefine what we understand as life, and, bizarrely, what we understand by "age".
(Excerpt) Read more at environment.newscientist.com ...
Yes, but do they poop oil?
CLUE: BACTERIA!! Buyer beware!!
God, that interesting.
Great! New menu items for Seafood Night at the club.
I keep coming up with Horta hears a Who. What’s up with that?
Also, I predict less than 1 week before the first article appears claiming this biomass is threatened by, you guessed it, global warming.
“Yes, but do they poop oil?”
No, but they finally found the source of global warming.
More likely they ooze feeeelings and suck penumbral rights.
Something tells me they are going to use this discovery to try and ban all ocean oil exploration worldwide.
There are still a lot of questions about where so much oil really came from. The moon of Saturn, Titan, has more hydrocarbons than all the oil and natural gas on Earth. There are literally lakes of the stuff.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080213-titan-oil.html
Yep, and global warming is destroying this habitat. 30 minutes ago, when it was discovered, it was thriving but now it has degenerated. If we don’t act soon it will be destroyed!
Viruses are everywhere. There are 10-100 million of them in a teaspoon of Seawater. We inhale them, eat them, and really are in a constant bath of them and bacteria ever day of our lives.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_1_108/ai_53682809
It has been found that viruses play a huge role in mutation (evolution) of bacteria.
“Coevolution with viruses drives the evolution of bacterial mutation rates”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7172/abs/nature06350.html
Oh, good. Let's dig that up!
Can’t be. We already know that if the temperature goes up another several degrees, all life will perish.
Given the overfishing, that may come true.
Isn’t this where Mulder and Scully make their entrance?
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