«We can see now at true planetary scale that increasing water temperature will have a huge impact on
microbial life in the ocean,» said Shinici Sunagawa, an EMBL staff scientist and a senior author on a second Tara paper.
His specialty is
microbial life in oceans, and his particular interest is the way that viruses drive the evolution and regulate the activities of bacteria.
The old way to search for
microbial life in the ocean, he explains, was to isolate individual species by growing them in laboratory cultures.
Knowledge of the diversity of
microbial life in the oceans continues to grow.
Not exact matches
The goal is to keep Juno from disrupting any aliens —
microbial or otherwise — that might
live in hidden
oceans of water below the icy shells of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.
Because such chemistry provides energy for
microbial life on Earth, the discovery makes Enceladus the top candidate for hosting
life elsewhere
in the solar system — besting even Jupiter's Europa, another icy moon with an
ocean.
An analysis of the deepest spot
in the
oceans finds signs of
microbial life.
Only further investigation will reveal how much of it makes its way from the river transport to the deep
ocean, however, and how it might affect marine
life, especially
microbial communities that
live in and feed on small organic particles.
The researchers who reported this finding
in Geophysical Research Letters say Dione's
ocean has existed since the moon's origin, which increases the chances that
microbial life is thriving
in its waters.
The
microbial communities
in these sediments include aggregates of methane - oxidizing archaea called ANME (for ANaerobic MEthanotrophs) and sulfate - reducing bacteria (SRB) that
live together symbiotically and help to remove some 80 percent of the methane released from
ocean sediments.
«Research spotlights a previously unknown
microbial «drama» playing
in the Southern
Ocean: Discovery highlights both competition, cooperation between algae, bacteria for iron and vitamins that may have consequences for life in a warming ocean.&r
Ocean: Discovery highlights both competition, cooperation between algae, bacteria for iron and vitamins that may have consequences for
life in a warming
ocean.&r
ocean.»
Although the evidence was subsequently contested, some single - celled
microbial life lacking a nucleus that segregates their internal DNA or RNA («prokaryotes») from the surrounding cytoplasm may have flourished
in darkness within cracks
in Earth's seafloor crust and around deep, warm or boiling hot
ocean springs (hydrothermal or volcanic vents, such as at Lost City or at black smokers) without a need for light or free oxygen
in the
oceans or atmosphere.
Commenting on the latest study, which he was not involved
in, he says the findings represent «excellent news» for the possibility of detecting
microbial life deep
in the
ocean.
Microbial life, however, should have survived
in or around cracks
in warm
ocean seafloors, deep volcanic vents, surface volcanic springs, and other warm niches.
Scientists announced Thursday that measurements from NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected hydrogen gas, a key energy source for
microbial life,
in a plume gushing from a vast liquid water
ocean buried beneath the icy shell of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
The discovery pushes back the earliest known existence of
microbial life on land by at least 580 million years, and raises an intriguing question — where did
life first emerge, on land or
in the
oceans?