Japanese and American scientists have successfully sprung tiny microbes back to life that had lain dormant 250 feet below the seafloor since the dinosaur age (the Mesozoic Era), allowing them to eat and multiply after generations. One might hope these microbes don’t evolve into dinosaurs. Their research highlights the incredible survival power of Earth’s most primitive species, which can survive for millions of years with hardly any food, sunlight, or oxygen.
The team, led by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology, wanted to see whether microscopic life survives in a seemingly dead zone beneath the ocean floor of the Pacific Ocean. “We wanted to know how long the microbes could sustain their life in a near-absence of food,” said Yuki Morono, who led the study.
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They analyzed ancient sediment samples that had been deposited over 100 million years ago on the seabed and found that with the right food and a little bit of oxygen, the microbes could be revived. The study was published on July 28 in Nature Communications.
Study co-author Steven D’Hondt, from the University of Rhode Island, said:
We knew that there was life in deep sediment near the continents where there’s a lot of buried organic matter. But what we found was that life extends in the deep ocean from the seafloor all the way to the underlying rocky basement.
The soil the microbes were found in was taken from a 2010 expedition to the South Pacific Gyre, an area known as one of the most nutrition-less, food-limited and life-deficient parts of the ocean. During this expedition, researchers onboard the JOIDES Resolution drillship extracted sediment cores from as deep as 250 feet (75 meters) below the seafloor.
Samples were taken out from ancient pelagic clay of the sediment cores to see if the energy-deprived microbes had retained their “metabolic potential” and could eat and multiply. The team gave the ancient microbes a boost of oxygen and fed them traceable substrates consisting of nitrogen and carbon (their food of choice.) Then, they sealed them in glass vials and incubated them for 21 days, six weeks, or 18 months before opening.
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Impressively, even in the oldest sediments sampled, the team was able to revive almost all of the original microbial community. “At first, I was skeptical, but we found that up to 99.1% of the microbes in sediment deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and were ready to eat,” Morono explained.
D’Hondt said:
It shows that there are no limits to life in the old sediment of the world’s ocean. In the oldest sediment, we’ve drilled, with the least amount of food, there are still living organisms, and they can wake up, grow, and multiply.
Previous studies have shown how bacteria can survive in some of the least welcoming places on Earth, including:
- Living in extreme conditions in cold deserts, including Antarctica and surviving off only air
- 16,000 ft deep in the ocean at the toxic waters of hydrothermal vents
- 750 meters (2,400 feet) deep in Earth’s lower crust in volcanic rocks
- In Colorado’s toxic caves filled with poisonous sulfur gas
- Super-salty, ultra-deadly brine pools in the Kebrit Deep
- Two thousand four hundred meters (7,875 feet) below the surface in a Canadian mine in Ontario
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