H
h2ouniverse
Guest
From New Scientist:<br /><br />"Shaken and stirred crust keeps deep microbes alive<br /><br />Earthquakes don’t always mean death and destruction – at least for the microbes deep in the crust. Regular rumblings could be what enables them to stay alive, and maybe even Martian bugs too.<br />Earth’s crust is known to host hardy bacteria even several kilometers below the surface. These cells have no sun or organic material to sustain them, so they feed off the chemical energy in reactive molecules like hydrogen dissolved in the water seeping out the rock. This means their growth and survival is limited by the flow of nutrients from deeper sources.<br />Now Norman Sleep and Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California say that earthquakes could provide these nutrients. The researchers’ calculations show that seismic events would happen regularly enough to ensure a dependable supply of food right across a tectonic plate, sustaining microbial life for billions of years (Astrobiology, vol 7, p 1023).<br />Earthquakes would open up cracks in the crust, they say, releasing pockets of deeper nutrient-rich water and exposing fresh rock that would further drive the chemical reactions that release molecules like hydrogen.<br />This mechanism might also keep microbes supplied with nutrients deep in the single-plate of Mars, they say."<br /><br />