Life found deep in the oceanic crust.

[Moontanman]

Microbes have been found living deep in the crust under the Earths oceans, this is the largest habitat on Earth. Fueled by chemosynthesis, these microbes may be part of the largest ecosystem on earth.

 

Chemosynthesis also fuels life at other deep-sea locations such as hydrothermal vents, but those are restricted to the edges of continental plates. The oceanic crust is much bigger. If similar microbes are found throughout it, the crust “would be the first major ecosystem on Earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight”, says Mark Lever, an ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who led the study. The results are published in Science.

 

 

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=life-found-deep-inside-earths-oceanic-crust&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20130315

[Ophiolite]

This is pertinent to Tommy Gold's hypothesis. For example, Gold, T The Deep Hot Biosphere PNAS v89 (3) p 6045-6049 1992

 

Abstract

 

There are strong indications that microbial life is widespread at depth in the crust of the Earth, just as such life has been identified in numerous ocean vents. This life is not dependent on solar energy and photosynthesis for its primary energy supply, and it is essentially independent of the surface circumstances. Its energy supply comes from chemical sources, due to fluids that migrate upward from deeper levels in the Earth. In mass and volume it may be comparable with all surface life. Such microbial life may account for the presence of biological molecules in all carbonaceous materials in the outer crust, and the inference that these materials must have derived from biological deposits accumulated at the surface is therefore not necessarily valid. Subsurface life may be widespread among the planetary bodies of our solar system, since many of them have equally suitable conditions below, while having totally inhospitable surfaces. One may even speculate that such life may be widely disseminated in the universe, since planetary type bodies with similar subsurface conditions may be common as solitary objects in space, as well as in other solar-type systems.

[Moontanman]

That was my first thought as well, but I've been told so many times that Golds ideas were hog wash that I hesitate to show my fandom of his Deep Hot Biosphere...

[akh]

 

That was my first thought as well, but I've been told so many times that Golds ideas were hog wash that I hesitate to show my fandom of his Deep Hot Biosphere...

I dont know Gold, but if this discovery is supported and reaffirmed, I would not find it surprising. It serves to show that given basic chemistry, life is a possible outcome. It will be interesting to see what future studies yield. My thoughts are that chemosynthetic processes are mutch more likely for the origins of life, and that these processes are mutch more likely to occur in the relatively stable environment of the oceanic crust. This of course turns one down the path of possibilities for life elsewhere. The more we look, the more we find life in every nook and cranny, existing in conditions once seen as absurd, the more I think there is nothing truly unique about life on this planet.

Edited March 16, 2013 by akh

[Moontanman]

The Deep Hot Biosphere postulates that life is a inevitable chemical reaction that occurs deep inside large bodies at the boundary of up welling hydrogen rich fluids and hot igneous rocks, at very high temperatures and pressures. He suggested that life as we know it is the real extremophiles and most life on earth exists at very high temperatures and pressures at great depths...

http://unconventionalgeology.blogspot.com/2012/01/deep-hot-biosphere.html

[StringJunky]

The Deep Hot Biosphere postulates that life is a inevitable chemical reaction that occurs deep inside large bodies at the boundary of up welling hydrogen rich fluids and hot igneous rocks, at very high temperatures and pressures. He suggested that life as we know it is the real extremophiles and most life on earth exists at very high temperatures and pressures at great depths...

 

http://unconventionalgeology.blogspot.com/2012/01/deep-hot-biosphere.html

 

It makes sense to me that life started in relatively extreme conditions like near hydrothermal vents as this area is highly kinetic with a wide range of thermal gradients around them so the opportunities for the necessary basic chemicals to interact and actual reactions occurring between them is pretty high I reckon.