Oh dear - more things that can affect the climate

Jethro_uk · 2013-08-28T11:33:01+00:00

that aren't anything to do with human activity A diverse range of life forms exists deep below Earth's surface, scientists have concluded, but they live at an incredibly slow pace. Long-lived bacteria, reproducing only once every 10,000 years, have been found in rocks 2.5km (1.5 miles) below the ocean floor that are as much as 100 million years old. Viruses and fungi have also been found. The discoveries raise questions about how life persists in such extreme conditions. Scientists from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program have announced the findings at the Goldschmidt conference, a meeting of more than 4,000 geochemists, in Florence, Italy. Fumio Inagaki of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, reported that the microbes exist in very low concentrations, of around 1,000 microbes in every tea spoon full of rock, compared with billions or trillions of bacteria that would typically be found in the same amount of soil at Earth's surface. Alongside the simple single-celled organisms (prokaryotes) found in the deep rocks, Tom Englehardt of the University of Oldenburg, Germany, showed that viruses are even more abundant, outnumbering microbes by more than 10 to one, with that ratio increasing with depth. Speaking to BBC News, Dr Englehardt said of these viruses: "They are quite stable in these sediments, especially as the metabolic rates of the cells are so low, and they exist in sediments up to 100 million years old." The number of microbes was so low that the distances between them were much greater than those of communities at Earth's surface, so the scientists were surprised to find that they could support a virus' life cycle. "We're pushing the boundaries of what we understand about how viruses cycle on Earth elsewhere, by studying them in the deep biosphere" Dr Beth Orcutt of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, US, told BBC News. Microbes exist in sediments that are up to 100 million years old Dr Orcutt...

Aug 28, 2013 80 Replies

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dennis 13 years ago

You are the only one to post insults, until now anyway, you stupid idiot.

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Oh dear - more things that can affect the climate

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