Source: New York Times
Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions
By JoAnna Klein
Dec. 19, 2018
At the surface, boiling water kills off most life. But Geogemma barossii is a living thing from another world, deep within our very own. Boiling water — 212 degrees Fahrenheit — would be practically freezing for this creature, which thrives at temperatures around 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
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These Altiarchaeales belong to a domain of nucleus-lacking single-celled microbes called Archaea. Archaea and bacteria make up the majority of life in the deep subsurface, and it’s estimated that there are more of these kinds of microbes below ground than above.
Some 200 to 600 octillion microbes live beneath our continents, suggests an analysis of data from sites all over the world, and even more live beneath the seafloor. Together they weigh the equivalent of up to 200 million blue whales — and far more than all 7.5 billion humans. Subterranean diversity rivals that of the surface, with most underground organisms yet to be discovered or characterized.
That means most microbes on the planet may not resemble our mental picture of a microbe at all, said Cara Magnabosco, a computational biologist the Flatiron Institute in New York.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/science/subsurface-microbes.html
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