| | There's life on Earth, and there's life in Earth. And the latter, overlooked for so long, is coming into focus as a wild menagerie of strange, diverse organisms.
We've known for some time that life can thrive even under the surface of the planet, within the very crust beneath the ocean floor.
A group of international scientists from the Deep Carbon Observatory have reported at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting on nearly 10 years of discovering such organisms. The life they found beneath the planet's surface expands our notions of its limits and opens up new terrain in the search off the Earth, for extraterrestrial life.
The deep biosphere — sometimes termed a "subterranean Galapagos" — is dominated by microbial life, organisms that derive their energy from rocks. Even though two types of microbes, bacteria and archaea, are the main discoveries, other types of life, including multicellular animals, have been found as well. Genetically, life below the surface is as or even more diverse than what's above. | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
| | | San Francisco and other water users will have to give up some of their water, unless they can agree on a way to share. | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
| | | Climate-related disasters are threatening nursing home patients in a health care system still unprepared for fires, flood and extreme heat. | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
| | | California's Dungeness crab season continues its slow open amid more delays and a lawsuit filed against the oil industry over climate change. | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
| | | 2018 will enter the record books as the second-warmest year for the Arctic since 1900. | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
| | | Nearly 100 people took to San Francisco's Ocean Beach on Saturday to identify and catalog animal and plant species along the coast as part of California Academy of Sciences' "bioblitz." | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
| | | Learn about tides and how to become part of the California King Tides project with Exploratorium and Port of San Francisco staff. Saturday, December 22, 10am, at Pier 3 on San Francisco's waterfront. Free admission, rain or shine! | | |
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
|
