The deeper under the Earth's surface, the more species you can find
20 comments
·January 20, 2025_tom_
tim333
The 1993 NYT article has
>Assuming that three miles was the limit, and that only 1 percent of the total pore space available in the rocky crust was occupied by microbes, then the total mass of living material there would be about 200 trillion tons. If that material were spread over all the Earth's land surfaces, Dr. Gold wrote, the global layer of microbial sludge would be nearly five feet thick. "This would indeed be more than the existing surface flora and fauna,"...(https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/28/science/strange-new-micro...)
Aromasin
Scientists aren't just finding biomass, stating that as the figure for the total, and adding to it. 15% will be an estimate with variance as stated by a predictive model. We have found fractions of a per cent, with 15% being a predicted upper limit.
BurningFrog
Bringing a serious drill to Mars to check for life deep in the ground is a very important project!
bongodongobob
We'll have to train a team of drillers to be astronauts. Those nerds at NASA what with all their math and charts don't know shit about drillin!
dageshi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73cWfFEKAfE
I have just the song to accompany the launch.
tim333
Musk:
>The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars.
I vote they stick a remote operated drilling rig in there.
drjasonharrison
Do we know how these microbes moved into these environments? Any idea if it was "surface water to underground" or the reverse? Microbes falling into a rift and moving sideways like cave dwellers taking up residence in a cave and adapting over generations?
scientator
In his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" Thomas Gold argued that life probably originated deep underground. Gold is a pretty controversial figure, but this hypothesis makes sense for a number of reasons: the underground environment is a lot more stable than the surface, and the chemistry to extract energy from the chemicals in that environment is a lot simpler than the chemistry to extract energy from sunlight. So it makes sense that underground chemosynthesis would emerge before photosynthesis.
tim333
Gold seemed an interesting character - I was just reading his Wikipedia.
The WaPo article on him is good
>As an astronomer and geophysicist, he says, "it always seemed absurd to me to see petroleum hydrocarbons on other planets, where there was obviously never any vegetation, even as we insist that on Earth they must be biological in origin." https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/daily/h...
r00fus
It’s been known for quite a while that most life actually generated from the deep and then seated upwards. Photosynthesis came well after these creatures.
fritzo
I would expect diversity to decrease with diffusion rate, so e.g. diversity in soil or mud would be lower than diversity in water.
marinmania
I imagine this could have more to do with how isolated these environments are?
There are more unique species on mountains or islands because it is hard for those species to leave and take over new territory. On the contrary, something on continental land or ocean can expand huge distances if it has new adaptation.
Just my amateur speculation, but I would imagine underground caves are very isolated from other caves even relatively close in terms of distance.
ljlolel
Would be more about total energy
ceejayoz
The article says otherwise:
> even at depths where the energy supply is orders of magnitude lower than enjoyed by organisms in habitats that see the sun
> Something unexpected that caught Ruff’s attention was how total diversity went up with depth. This was surprising because less energy is available at deeper levels of the subsurface. For archaea, diversity went up with the increase in depth in terrestrial environments but not marine environments. The same happened with bacteria, except in marine instead of terrestrial environments.
jvanderbot
I wonder if fewer reliable energy gradients means hyperspecialization around smaller niches.
pseudony
Gears of war, anyone ?
ziknard
From the abstract, "Diversity of terrestrial microbiomes decreases with depth..."
Decreases. Gets smaller.
That is a copy and paste from the abstract of the paper.
Exaggerated by the ignorant tech press and the legacy media; misinterpreted by the public who probably did not read the article, let alone the paper it is based on.
Are we actively trying to become morons, or is it a passive process?
Oarch
"Diversity of terrestrial microbiomes decreases with depth, while marine subsurface diversity and phylogenetic distance to cultured isolates rivals or exceeds that of surface environments."
This is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere
"he biomass in the deep subsurface is about 15% of the total for the biosphere"
I'd bet that it's a higher percentage. That 15% represents what we have already found. There is likely more at greater depths we haven't found, and perhaps other types of life we aren't yet recognizing yet (a parallel to finding Archaea),