The annual conference of the American Geophysical Union opens in Washington on December 12. And for this event, a report on the sensational discovery was released.
The Deep Carbon Observatory research team drilled wells to depths of many kilometers and unexpectedly discovered whole "underground forests of life" at such depths.
And these "forests" have probably been around for millions of years.
Naturally, we are not talking about animals and not even about insects, but about very small organisms. Which manage to survive at such a depth without access to sunlight, in critical temperatures and with virtually no power.
Many of these creatures are not yet known to science, and scientists say that there are a huge number of these creatures in the bowels of the Earth, in terms of one hundred trillion quadrillion.
In the photo below, a creature belonging to primitive eukaryotes - microorganisms that have a nucleus. It was found at a depth of 1.4 km.
According to the researchers, the entire biomass of these living things is between 15 and 23 gigatons in terms of pure carbon. For comparison: the biomass of microbes on the Earth's surface is only 80 gigatons, and the total mass of humanity is "negligible" 0.06 gigatons of carbon.
For 10 years of work, the Deep Carbon Observatory has drilled about 100 wells in different parts of the Earth and on different continents, including on the ocean floor. The maximum depth of wells in the oceans was 10 km below the ocean surface, and 5 km on land.
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The photo below shows bacteria that survive on hydrogen. Scientists found them in a gas-filled crack at a depth of 2.8 km near Johannesburg, South Africa.
Another sensation of the study was that at such a huge depth, scientists found 70% of microorganisms living on the surface. And immediately the question arose of how these organisms move at such a depth and how they spread to 5 continents.
Basically, all microorganisms found were either bacteria, or archaea (single-celled microorganisms without a nucleus) or primitive eukaryotes (having a nucleus). However, one of the leaders of the project, Mitch Sogin, believes that they also managed to find "the very first and previously unknown forms of the tree of life."
These blue hairs are bacteria of the Methanobacterium species that produce methane. They were found 2 km below the Pacific Ocean floor off the coast of Japan.