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Deep Down
How slow can life go? How deep? At what point does biology become geology?
Dig down and you will find some answers.
If you go to the bottom of the ocean, first drill and drill and drill until you reach a further 2.5 kilometers. Smack through rock that has lain there 100 million years. What do you find under the intense pressure?
Life. A different sort of life.
There live bacteria that reproduce every 10,000 years, as described in the recent Goldschmidt Conference on Geochemistry. Their metabolism is so slow some scientists consider them zombie-like – living in stasis.
And what of the viruses around them that are ten times more numerous than the bacteria? How can they survive when the organisms they parasitize are spread at a millionth to a billionth of their density on earth’s surface?
Or are all those viruses in stasis too?
It’s been known for a while that most of life on earth may exist underneath the land and sea. Bacterial biomass beneath the earth’s meandering crust may dwarf the life we enjoy sheltered inside its atmosphere. Yet there are further implications to the new forms of life we are finding on our own planet:
Life Is Fast and Slow
In your cells there are a billion protein-protein interactions every second. You have ten trillion cells.
Yet there are bacteria below the earth which appear to muster no discernible activity at all. And you possess one hundred trillion bacteria inhabiting your gut alone.
Reproduction every 10,000 years may be awfully fast for some bacteria. Researchers are still scratching their heads after finding large bacterial populations living in underwater catchments underneath Antarctica that are dark, very deep – and have not seen the surface for an estimated 86 million years.
Is it possible some viruses are presently lasting millions of years? If so, these forms of life survive unyielding environments by shifting the nature of biological time.
Which means if we know what we are doing, we, too can make things last a lot longer than we think.
Life From Beyond
Much ink gets spilled on organic molecules “found” on the surface of meteorites, or asserted to be splashed from comets. Now we have evidence that life on earth can survive conditions like that of space – and apparently remain in stasis indefinitely.
Life may well be seeded by the random travels of comets and asteroids.
The Earth Is Alive
We tend to think of life as something existing on land, water, or perhaps a few meters beneath our lawns. Mine, pollute, pipe on trench deeper into earth and we imagined ourselves merely disturbing soil, rock and more rock, regions of the undead.
Not so. Lower and lower we find life abundant. Our earth is alive – at our level, below, and far into the atmosphere. When we frack, when we drill for oil and platinum and diamons, we’re changing more than our water supply – we’re changing ecosystems of which we know next to nothing.
Carbon Capture
Some climatologists are stumped. Global warming has not proceeded at quite the pace they expected.
Are we out of the woods? Sadly we don’t really know where these woods start or end.
Some think planetary warmth is being captured in the oceans. The deep oceans have indeed warmed faster than surface waters – at least of late. Whether this heat will sometime suddenly unleash and lead to rapid world wide ice melts is unknown.
Yet our crude models, depending so much on linear extrapolations, lull us into false confidence. Many natural processes operate non-linearly, even exponentially. Sometimes the upheavals are truly violent.
However, the appearance of bacteria so far below the earth’s surface argues that methods of carbon capture – so needed to control fossil fuel burning – may not require engineering giant caverns with supersized steel pipes.
Carbon may be captured by bacteria and other organisms that lie beneath the earth. What we presently destroy by mining and fracking may someday help save us from the methane and carbon dioxide we release on the surface.
Bottom Line
Life as we live it is supremely fast and violent. Sitting inside a human cell is like taking the contents of your bedroom and flashing them around a blender at supersonic speeds. Yet the processes are so delicately balanced that repair and restoration occur faster than destruction, the end result newer and brighter than what came before.
But life can also move as slowly as soil squeezed into rock. Viruses exist where there appear too few living organisms to sustain them, which means they require eons of waiting to act. And just as the ocean is another world of which we know little, the earth beneath our surface is a wholly different world of which we know less.
Life already survives “impossible” conditions. It’s time for us to learn how those processes work. Undersanding them may allow us to survive, too.
