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The microbes Orcutt and her team study receive no light that far beneath the ocean floor, so part of what they are exploring is how these microscopic organisms survive in such harsh conditions.
The microbes Orcutt and her team study receive no light that far beneath the ocean floor, so part of what they are exploring is how these microscopic organisms survive in such harsh conditions.
Beth Orcutt, a post-doctoral fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Southern California, presented her new findings about this little researched realm at Goldschmidt 2010, an annual conference sponsored by a number of international geochemical societies and hosted this year by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"I think this research is exciting because it offers us a glimpse into a habitat on Earth that we know next to nothing about," Orcutt said.
"If you consider how much ocean crust there is on Earth, and how much of that is hydrologically active, then this environment could be one of the most massive habitats for microbial life on Earth. There may be new species of life and new types of metabolism that we haven't discovered yet."
