March 5, 2013
A dark realm far beneath the Earth's
surface is a surprisingly rich home for tiny worms and "zombie microbes"
that may hold clues to the origins of life, scientists said on Monday.
"It's an amazing new world,"
said Robert Hazen, head of the Deep Carbon Observatory, a decade-long $US500
million project to study the planet's carbon, an element vital to life and found
in everything from oil to diamonds.
"It's very possible that there's a
deep microbial biosphere that goes down more than 10 km (6 miles), maybe
20," Hazen told Reuters of the first book by the Observatory, published on
Monday and written by more than 50 experts in nine countries.
Microbes had been reported, for instance,
in rocks recovered by drilling more than 6 km below the surface in China
The single-celled microbes found deep
underground include bacteria, which need water and nutrients to grow but not
necessarily oxygen, and archaea, which can live off compounds such as ammonia
or sulphur.
A lack of food in what the 700-page report
called the "Stygian realm" - after the River Styx of the underworld
in Greek mythology - meant some microbes might be "zombies", or so
slow-living as to seem dead.
The book, "Carbon in Earth",
said some microbes may live deep below ground and grow and reproduce extremely
slowly or perhaps even "live without dividing for millions to tens of
millions of years".
Hazen, who works at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, DC, said the scientists working on the project,
which began in 2009, were also studying the possibility that life on Earth
might have originated underground.
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