Photographs of rare species from unexplored area of Antarctic seabed highlight the need to protect life in one of the most remote places on the planet. The images below are the first of creatures found in a previously unexplored region of the Antarctic seabed offering a fascinating glimpse of life in one of the most remote and pristine places on the planet.
“I think that if we find life elsewhere it’s going to look, at least chemically, very much like modern life,” says evolutionary biologist William Martin at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Among the astrobiological implications of our LUCA paper is the fact that you do not need light. It’s chemical energy that ran the origin of life, chemical energy that ran the first cells and chemical energy that is present today on bodies like Enceladus.”
We know more about the ancient lakes of Mars than we know about Antarctica’s subglacial environment, but in three weeks, a team of intrepid Antarctica scientists will drill 1,000 meters (3,200 feet) into the ice to find out what’s hidden for thousands of years buried in Mercer Subglacial Lake, formed about 10,000 years ago. The lake was first detected via NASA satellite, but never explored by humans. What they find could help to form better hypotheses about life on other planets, like on Mars or Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus.
Life in Deep Earth totals 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon — hundreds of times more than humans. “Even in dark and energetically challenging conditions, intraterrestrial ecosystems have uniquely evolved and persisted over millions of years,” observed Fumio Inagaki, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. “Expanding our knowledge of deep life will inspire new insights into planetary habitability, leading us to understand why life emerged on our planet and whether life persists in the Martian subsurface and other celestial bodies.”
(more…)
“Beneath the ocean floor huge reservoirs of hydrocarbon gases–including methane, propane, butane and others–exist now, and these microbes prevent greenhouse gases from being released into the atmosphere,” said assistant professor of marine science Brett Baker, at the University of Texas at Austin.
