Researchers discover life in deep ocean sediments at or above water’s boiling point

“An international research team that included three scientists from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography has discovered single-celled microorganisms in a location where they didn’t expect to find them.

‘Water boils on the (Earth’s) surface at 100 degrees Celsius, and we found organisms living in sediments at 120 degrees Celsius,’ said URI Professor of Oceanography Arthur Spivack, who led the geochemistry efforts of the2016 expedition organized by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Germany’s MARUM-Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. The study was carried out as part of the work of Expedition 370 of the International Ocean Discovery Program.

The research results from a two-month-long expedition in 2016 will be published today in the journal Science.

The news follows an announcement in October that microbial diversity below the seafloor is as rich as on Earth’s surface. Researchers on that project from the Japan marine-earth science group, Bremen University, the University of Hyogo, University of Kochi and University of Rhode Island, discovered 40,000 different types of microorganisms from core samples from 40 sites around the globe.

The research published in Science today focused on the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan, where the deep-sea scientific vessel, Chinkyu, drilled a hole 1,180 meters deep to reach sediment at 120 degrees Celsius. The leader of the study is Professor Kai-Uwe Hinrichs of MARUM.

Spivack, who was joined by recent Ph.D. graduates, Kira Homola and Justine Sauvage, on the URI team, said one way to identify life is to look for evidence of metabolism.

‘We found chemical evidence of the organisms’ use of organic material in the sediment that allows them to survive,’ Spivack said. The URI team also developed a model for the temperature regime of the site.

‘This research tells us that deep sediment is habitable in places that we did think possible,’ he added.”

View the whole story here: https://today.uri.edu/news/researchers-discover-life-in-deep-ocean-sediments-at-or-above-waters-boiling-point/

Originally published at https://www.focusonthegoodnews.com on December 4, 2020.