Resumen de Life could exist up to 10 km below sea floor
Life might eke out an existence far deeper inside Earth than people imagined. Samples from a mud volcano contain biological signatures that suggest microbes lived in the material when it was several kilometers beneath the ocean floor. Oliver Plumper of Utrecht University and his team studied 46 samples drilled from the South Chamorro mud volcano, near the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana trench. Here, one tectonic plate slides under another. The heat and stress causes some of the material on the subducting plate to become a buoyant mineral called serpentinite that rises and erupts out of mud volcanoes. Examining the serpentinite in their samples. the team found chemicals usually produced by life, including amino acids and hydrocarbons. Given that some microbes can withstand temperatures as high as 122°C and pressures about 3,000 times higher than at Earth's surface, Plumper calculates that life could survive up to 10 kilometers beneath the seabed.
