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A global team of scientists has discovered a vast ecosystem of billions of micro-organisms equivalent to twice the size of the world's oceans and confirmed that the Earth was much more vital than previously thought. Deep Life studies have revealed a rich ecosystem beneath our feet, the size of that found in almost every ocean in the world.
Despite the intense heat, lack of light, poor nutrition and intense pressure, scientists have estimated that this underground biosphere contains 15 to 23 billion tonnes of microorganisms, hundreds of times the weight of every human being on this planet.
The Deep Carbon Observatory claims that the diversity of the underground world is similar to that of the Amazon or the Galapagos, but unlike those places, its environment is still largely clean because the inhabitants have not yet examined most of the underground areas.
"It's like finding a new repository of life on Earth," said Karen Lloyd, an badociate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "We are constantly discovering new types of life – there is a lot of life in the earth and not above it."
The team brings together 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology to microbiology to chemistry and physics. One year before the end of their 10-year study, they will present a set of results before the opening of the US Geophysical Union's annual meeting this week.
During the study, samples were taken from boreholes located more than 5 km from underwater sites in order to build ecosystem models and estimate the amount of carbon living that can contain them. The results indicated that 70% of the bacteria and deaths of the Earth are present in the soil, including the thorny bacteria that live in sulfur sources and Geogemabarossii, a single-cell organism found in hydrothermal vents located at the bottom of the sea .
Scientists discovered a structure buried 2.5 kilometers below the surface of the Earth for millions of years, without sunlight, and discovered that methanogen was a way to create methane in a low-energy environment that would not be used for reproduction or division, but for the replacement or repair of broken parts. They tried to find a minimum whose life could not exist beyond, but the more they dug, the more they found life. The maximum temperature is 122, but they believe this record will be broken as exploration continues and more modern tools are developed.
But many mysteries and questions remain, especially about whether life colonizes the depths or the surface, how microbes interact with chemical processes and what this may reveal about the evolution of life and the world. Earth.
Robert Hazen, a metal scientist at Carnegie Endowment for Science, said, "We must ask ourselves: If life on Earth is different from our experience, what is the strangeness we can face when exploring life on Earth? from other worlds? "
Source: New
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