New Extreme Deep Sea Lifeform Discovered

"There might be a on other planets that may not require the ability to harness sunlight on a planet's surface for energy."

R. John Parkes, microbiologist at Cardiff University

It is a fascinating thing when scientists delve to locations previously untouched. Now, in such a discovery, 1.6 kilometers beneath the seafloor in the North Atlantic Ocean, a new life-form has been found. This marks not only the deepest known point that an organism exists beneath the ocean bottom, but is also possibly the hottest life-form yet found in seafloor sediments.

This may sound a little on the prosaic side, granted, but it brings hope to those beyond the seafloor-sedimentary crowd. If such organisms are living deep in to our planet’s surface, could the same be said for other planets like or mo ons like Europa and Titan.

Scientists pulled core samples from the North Atlantic sea bottom, and in them found microbes known as prokaryotes, a group of organisms that lack a cell nucleus, or any other membrane-bound organelles. Many of the discovered prokaryotes shared traits with extremophiles, organism’s that thrives in and may even require physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are, to the majority of life on Earth, thoroughly unhelpful.

According to study co-author R. John Parkes, a microbiologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, the microbes appear to spend their time metabolizing methane and other hydrocarbons. "That's what we think they're using as an energy source."

As for how this will impact the search for alien life? Our "surface centric" view of life on Earth, Parkes said, may mean we're looking in the wrong places for life elsewhere.

"There are [nonbiological] sources that can produce methane [and related chemicals]," he said. "Therefore there might be a on other planets that may not require" the ability to harness sunlight on a planet's surface for energy.

And Parkes isn’t the only one to agree with this assessment. "The more places we look for life, the more places we find it," said Dennis Geist, a University of Idaho geologist who was not involved in the study. "This [new study] furthers the notion that the days of limiting our search for new life to surface conditions are long gone. The findings of this work push the limits in terms of both pressure and temperature."

Posted by Josh Hill.

Related Galaxy posts:

Atomic Extremophiles Thrive Where the Life-Giving Energy of the Sun Never Reaches
Extremophiles & the Search for Life in the Solar System
Ancient Antarctic Microbes Revived in Lab
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -NASA's Phoenix Probe & the Search for
Is There Life on Mars? NASA Goes Underground to Find Out
Non-Carbon Lifeforms -Why We May Overlook Extra-terrestrial Life
Did Life Originate from Clay -Science Fiction or Reality?
Life from the Center of the Earth - The Shadow World of Our Hidden
Is There Life on Mars? NASA Goes Underground to Find Out
What Lies Beneath -A Mystery at the Earth's Center
Unknown Species of the Underworld Discovered

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080523-deepest-life.html

Comments

[Silver Raven]

It's about time that the scientists realise that life is everywhere and it doesn't have to be on the surface or need the sun for energy. There is a Universe full of life and probably not like us!!