There is life very deep in the Earth upper crust and not only bacteria
Reproduced from bbc-Earth, by Jasmin Fox-Skelly, November 24, 2015
"The strange beasts that live in solid rock deep underground
"The strange beasts that live in solid rock deep underground
Just
how far down in the Earth's crust can animals survive? In the dark,
hot depths of several South African gold mines, there live some tiny
worms that may hold the key to answering that question.These
creatures are the deepest living animals that have ever been
discovered.Nematodes can transform into a special form called
the dauerstage.
In this form, they can survive harsh conditions for long periods
before reawakening when the going gets good again. Surely
if any animal could live deep inside the Earth it would be this hardy
worm? This
makes them similar to tardigrades: tiny creatures that can survive
being boiled,
frozen, crushed, dried out or blasted into space by
going into a kind of stasis. In the dauer stage, the nematode
goes into stasis and its metabolism slows. The stage is triggered by
a pheromone and occurs when there is a lack of food, high
temperature, or overcrowding. Nematodes in the dauer state are
spectacularly resilient. When
the space shuttle Columbia broke up after re-entering Earth's
atmosphere in 2003,
there were nematodes on board:they
survived both the disintegration and the fall back to Earth.
Nematodes have populated almost all areas of the world. They
can be found in hot springs, deserts, high up mountains and in the
deepest oceans. They live in Antarctica, inside the bellies of other
animals including humans, and even inside
the placentas of sperm whales.
Surely if any animal could live deep inside the Earth it would be
this hardy worm. No one knows how they got down there,
but they could have been living in the mines for thousands of years.
Their very existence suggests that complex life can survive far
deeper in the Earth than was ever thought possible. most
scientists believed that the bowels of the Earth could only house
single-celled organisms like bacteria. In the deep Earth it is hot
and dark, and there is very little oxygen. There is also not much
food down there, so any animal making its home in the belly of the
Earth would struggle to get a decent meal. One scientist thought
differently. Gaetan
Borgonie was
previously at the University of Ghent in Belgium and is now at
Extreme Life Isyensya in Gentbrugge, Belgium. He was convinced that
one animal could survive deep down in the Earth's crust: a nematode
worm. That is because nematodes are extremely hardy, able to
cope with extreme heat, cold and dehydration. They have an ingenious
trick that allows them to survive. Borgonie decided to look for
himself, but sceptical grant holders denied him funding. So he teamed
up with Tullis
Onstott of
Princeton University in New Jersey, who also believed that nematodes
could exist deep underground. The pair used money from their own
savings to travel to South Africa. Before
this, nematodes were only known to live a few dozen feet
underground They
chose South African mines because they are the deepest accessible
places on Earth.

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