Friday, January 20, 2023

3831 - UNDERGROUND LIFE - or life on other planets?

 

     -  3831 -     UNDERGROUND  LIFE  -  or life on other planets?    Water trapped below Earth's surface for billions of years could hold keys to unlocking the secrets of extraterrestrial life.  Ancient water trapped deep within an Alpine mountain range harbors microbial life that might look quite like that on other planets.


            ---------  3831  -  UNDERGROUND  LIFE  -  or life on other planets?

            -    In the depths of an Alpine mountain range is the “Bedretto tunnel”, a disused access way to a railway tunnel underneath the imposing Saint-Gotthard mountain range in the Swiss Alps. Deep within the towering mass of granite, geobiologist collects sample of water that hasn't seen the light of day for millions of years.

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            -    In those samples,  are searches for ancient microorganisms that are quite different from those found on Earth's surface.   Unlike most of today's life, these microorganisms don't need oxygen to survive, which makes scientists believe that they might look quite like those that first emerged on our planet over 3,500,000,000 years ago when Earth's atmosphere had little oxygen.

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            -    These inhabitants of the wet mountain darkness could teach us about life on other bodies in the solar system, like Mars or the ice-covered moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

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            -    Scientists know that living organisms produce methane. But so do many geological processes. But the methane that is a byproduct of life may look different than the purely geological gas. It may contain different isotopes, forms of the same chemical element with a different number of neutrons in their nucleus. Learning to distinguish between those isotopic differences on Earth will help them develop tools and techniques to do the same elsewhere in the solar system.

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            -    It's not just methane that can give out a planet's or a moon's secret. There is a whole range of chemical elements that scientists are interested in, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

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            -    The water in which Magnabosco searches for the microbes may at first glance appear just like the water running from the tap or raining from the sky. But sensitive scientific instruments reveal that the liquid is, in fact, very different.

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            -    Trapped miles below the planet's surface by geological faults and fractures, the ancient water is saltier and has less oxygen dissolved in it than waters far above.  Scientists can detect more hydrogen and traces of methane in these subterranean samples.

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            -    The water that drips from the walls of the Bedretto tunnel is no more than 300 million years old, but elsewhere in the world such as in Canada and South Africa, deeper deposits have been found that are up to a billion years old. Microbes trapped in such waters have evolved without contact with the planet's surface for more than a quarter of the time for which life has existed on Earth.

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            -    In this old water, the amount of living cells per milliliter can be tens of thousands times lower than what we see in the ocean.  Since conditions on other bodies in the solar system are unlikely to make it easy for any lifeforms to survive, geobiologists hope that learning how life operates on the edge of survivability under Earth's crust will tell them where and how to look for its traces elsewhere.   This life have been isolated from the surface for a long time and haven't had any input from photosynthesis or oxygen.

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            -    The researchers have found that those creatures dwelling in the depths are not completely different from the everyday daylight-savoring microbes, however. They are made of similar types of proteins, and their DNA is so similar to their aboveground counterparts, in fact, that scientists are quite certain the underground creatures must be distant cousins of the surface microbes.

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            -    Was the original ancestor something underground that went to the surface or something on the surface that went underground. The underground residents are much more similar to those distant ancestors than the much busier life forms on the planet's surface. While the world underground has barely changed for billions of years, allowing the microbes to relax into a predictable existence, conditions on the surface have shifted many times, forcing organisms to adapt and evolve.

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            -    The conditions and the reactions that are taking place there and driving the organisms living there are relatively consistent over really long time scales, which is a lot different than the surface of our planet where we have seen huge changes in concentrations of oxygen over the billions of years but also changes in ocean chemistry and the nutrient supply on the surface.

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            -    Microbial life may indeed be waiting to be discovered elsewhere in the solar system. In the meantime, it turns out we have also had some very alien neighbors right under our noses this whole time.

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            January 10, 2022       UNDERGROUND  LIFE  -  or life on other planets?            3821                                                                                                                             

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