In some subterranean aquifers, cells have a chemical trick for making oxygen. It offers new insight into how life survives deep underground on Earth—and where it might lurk in space.
with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent most of the planet’s microbial mass and whose diversity may exceed that of surface-dwelling life forms.
and scraping by on traces of nutrients. As those resources get depleted, it was thought, the underground environment must become lifeless with greater depth., researchers presented evidence that challenges those assumptions. In groundwater reservoirs 200 meters below the fossil fuel fields of Alberta, Canada, they discovered abundant microbes that produce unexpectedly large amounts of oxygen even in the absence of light.
The new study looked at deep aquifers in the Canadian province of Alberta, which has such rich deposits of underground tar, oil sands, and hydrocarbon that it has been dubbed “the Texas of Canada.” Because its huge cattle farming and agriculture industries rely heavily on groundwater, the provincial government actively monitors the water’s acidity and chemical composition. Yet no one had systematically studied the groundwater microbiology.
A pattern in the numbers puzzled them. Usually, in surveys of the sediment under the seafloor, for example, scientists find that the number of microbial cells decreases with depth: Older, deeper samples can’t sustain as much life because they are more cut off from the nutrients made by photosynthetic plants and algae near the surface. But to the surprise of Ruff’s team, the older, deeper groundwaters held more cells than the fresher waters did.
The researchers then started identifying the microbes in the samples, using molecular tools to spot their telltale marker genes. A lot of them were methanogenic archaea—simple, single-celled microbes that produce methane after consuming hydrogen and carbon oozing out of rocks or in decaying organic matter. Also present were many bacteria that feed on the methane or on minerals in the water.
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