3 ms·
Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions
- heyjudy 8y agohttps://outline.com/3HbVpd https://outline.com/3HbVpd
- EamonnMR 8y agoI was surprised to recently read that there are bacteria and archea living inside oil wells. https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/resources/oilfield_review/ors89/jan89/4_bacteria.pdf https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/resources/oilfield_review/...
- kieckerjan 8y agoReminds me of the Deep Hot Biosphere theory by the brilliant and controversial Thomas Gold. Posited as early as 1992 this theory states that microbial life is very prevalent at great depth and that it may be responsible for the production of hydrocarbons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold
- Luc 8y agoI remember reading this at the time and finding it quite persuasive. I would love to find out how it fares compared to current scientific consensus.
- ryanmercer 8y agoDoesn't even have to be deep beneath your feet, a square meter of average soil contains thousands of species. In that square meter you can have 10,000,000,000 baceria, 1,000,000,000 protozoa, 5,000,000 nematodes, 100,000 mites 10,000-200,000 individual Collembola, 10,000 rotifiers and/or tardigrades, a few thousand larger insects/spiders/diplurans and dozens of slugs & snails. That's within a few inches of the surface. A cubic meter would increase that considerably for stuff like bacteria and protozoa. This is my biggest issue with terraforming another planet. It isn't the massive geo-engineering, it's adding all of that biodiversity and spreading it over a regional or global scale... even transplanting an initial acre would be a daunting task.
- mistrial9 8y agomaybe a natural square meter of average soil.. think of the micro-plastics, hard chemicals and decaying man-made materials and their prevalence.. quite a mess I would think