The deeper under the Earth's surface, the more species you can find
16 comments
·January 20, 2025BurningFrog
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.
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.
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),