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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Scientists Reveal a Massive Biosphere of Life Hidden Under Earth's Surface [sciencealert.com]

Earth is not the home you think it is. Far below the scant surface spaces we inhabit, the planet is teeming with an incredibly vast and deep 'dark biosphere [sciencealert.com]' of subterranean lifeforms that scientists are only just beginning to comprehend.

[...] "Ten years ago, we had sampled only a few sites – the kinds of places we'd expect to find life," explains [deepcarbon.net] microbiologist Karen Lloyd from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "Now, thanks to ultra-deep sampling, we know we can find them pretty much everywhere, albeit the sampling has obviously reached only an infinitesimally tiny part of the deep biosphere."

There's a good reason why the sampling remains in its early stages. In a preview of results from an epic 10-year collaboration by over 1,000 scientists, Lloyd and fellow researchers with the Deep Carbon Observatory [deepcarbon.net] (DCO) estimate the deep biosphere – the zone of life under Earth's surface – occupies a volume of between 2 to 2.3 billion cubic kilometres (0.48 to 0.55 billion cubic miles). That's almost twice the volume of all the world's oceans – another enormous natural environment [sciencealert.com] that lies largely unexplored by humans [sciencealert.com].

And just like the oceans, the deep biosphere is an abundant source of countless lifeforms – a population totalling some 15 to 23 billion tonnes of carbon mass (between 245 to 385 times greater than the equivalent mass of all humans on the surface).

The findings, representing numerous studies conducted at hundreds of sites around the world, are based on analyses of microbes extracted from sediment samples sourced 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) under the seafloor, and drilled from surface mines and boreholes more than 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) deep.

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