JoAnna Klein writes:

At the surface, boiling water kills off most life. But Geogemma barossii is a living thing from another world, deep within our very own. Boiling water — 212 degrees Fahrenheit — would be practically freezing for this creature, which thrives at temperatures around 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

No other organism on the planet is known to be able to live at such extreme heat.

But it’s just one of many mysterious microbes living in a massive subterranean habitat that until recently has been practically invisible. Over the past decade, scientists from around the world have banded together under the Deep Carbon Observatory to make sense of these hidden habitats. The observatory’s researchers presented some of their recent discoveries last week.

With high-tech drills, ROVs and submersibles, pressurized collection tubes, the latest DNA technology and computer modeling, the researchers have explored volcanoes, diamond mines, deep-sea hot springs, underwater mud volcanoes and other extreme sites beneath our oceans and continents. What they’ve found turns what we know about the world literally upside down.

So science fiction fans, rejoice. The real journey to the center of the Earth has begun.

These Altiarchaeales belong to a domain of nucleus-lacking single-celled microbes called Archaea. Archaea and bacteria make up the majority of life in the deep subsurface, and it’s estimated that there are more of these kinds of microbes below ground than above.

Some 200 to 600 octillion microbes live beneath our continents, suggests an analysis of data from sites all over the world, and even more live beneath the seafloor. Together they weigh the equivalent of up to 200 million blue whales — and far more than all 7.5 billion humans. Subterranean diversity rivals that of the surface, with most underground organisms yet to be discovered or characterized. [Continue reading…]