Tuesday 11 December 2018

morlocks and eloi

Via Slashdot, the Guardian reports on a massive and thriving subterranean ecosystem that rivals life above ground and in the oceans. Though unclear whether life first welled up to the surface or burrowed down, the cycles which the buried biomes follow are not the ephemeral or seasonal shifts that we observe on land but truly on geological scales with some microorganisms with life spans reaching into centuries, if not beyond. Findings and samples from nearly a decade’s long study from the Deep Carbon Observatory—a consortium of over twelve hundred biologists, chemists and geologists—are to be presented to the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference in the upcoming weeks.