About hyperthermobacteria
The Deep Hot Biosphere
Thomas Gold
There
are strong indications that microbial life is widespread at depth in the crust
of the Earth, just as such life has been identified in numerous ocean vents.
This life is not dependent on solar energy and photosynthesis for its primary
energy supply, and it is essentially independent of the surface circumstances.
Its energy supply comes from chemical sources, due to fluids that migrate
upward from deeper levels in the Earth. In mass and volume it may be comparable
with all surface life. Such microbial life may account for the presence of
biological molecules in all carbonaceous materials in the outer crust, and the
inference that these materials must have derived from biological deposits
accumulated at the surface is therefore not necessarily valid. Subsurface life
may be widespread among the planetary bodies of our solar system, since many of
them have equally suitable conditions below, while having totally inhospitable
surfaces. One may even speculate that such life may be widely disseminated in
the universe, since planetary type bodies with similar subsurface conditions
may be common as solitary objects in space, as well as in other solar-type
systems.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC49434/
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