Giant Underground Ecosystems Discovered by Scientists
- Cilometers under our feet,there is a hidden world with an remarkable scale,an ecosystem in a billions of microorganisms.
- Its amazing diversity makes him nicknamed 'Galapagos underground' and shows that his genetic wealth might rival or even surpass life on the ground.
- When presenting the results of their research at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 2018, researchers calculated the size of the treasure of this mysterious...
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Cilometers under our feet,there is a hidden world with an remarkable scale,an ecosystem in a billions of microorganisms.
Its amazing diversity makes him nicknamed ‘Galapagos underground’ and shows that his genetic wealth might rival or even surpass life on the ground.
When presenting the results of their research at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 2018, researchers calculated the size of the treasure of this mysterious life for the first time, and it turned out to be far greater than they expected.
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They reported that around 70% of the total number of microbes in the planet lived underground. In total, this microbe represents around 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon, hundreds of times greater than the mass of carbon all humans on the surface.
Scientists have just explored deeper to describe this microorganism.however, a glimpse of view shows that the genetic diversity of life below the surface may be proportional to, or maybe even exceeding, life above the surface. This is why this ecosystem is nicknamed ‘Underground Galapagos’.
However,don’t expect a giant turtle there. His evolutionary bacteria and cousin, Archaea, seemed to dominate below the surface, although the researchers also recorded quite a lot of Eukarya there. for example, researchers described non -identified nematodes at a depth of more than 1.4 kilometers in a gold mine of South Africa.
“Ten years ago, we only took samples in several locations, the types of places that we expected will be found life,” said Karen Lloyd, study author and Associate Professor Microbiology at the University of Tennessee, in a statement in 2018, quoted from IFL Science, sunday (8/31/2025).
“thanks to ultra-deep sampling,we know we can find them almost everywhere,even though the sampling is clearly only reaching a very small part of the deep biosphere,” added Professor Lloyd.
To achieve this finding,the team combines dozens of studies by reviewing samples taken from drilling as deep as 2.5 to 5 kilometers into the earth’s crust, both on the seabed and on the inland continents.In addition, what surprised them was to find that the biosphere was below the surface almost double the volume of all oceans.
Exposed to intense heat, extraordinary pressure, without light, and almost no nutrition, this is where scientists almost do not estimate the existence of biodiversity.
Still, researchers say that this ecosystem can answer many questions about the boundaries of life on earth, and outside.
“Our study of biosphere microbes has produced a lot of new knowledge, but also a much greater awareness and appreciation about how much we have not learned about life below the surface,” added Rick Colwell, a microbial ecologist at Oregon State University.
“Such as, scientists do not know all the ways of life below the surface that affect life on the surface, and vice versa. and, for now, we can only admire the nature of metabolism that allows life to survive under very bad conditions and is not possible for