The story appears on

Page A3

September 9, 2016

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » World

Scientists in search for hottest life forms

SCIENTISTS will start drilling off Japan this month to seek the hottest place where life can survive in an uncharted realm deep below the seabed.

Drilling under the Nankai Trough in the Pacific Ocean will be part of a project by 900 experts to map carbon underground, hoping for clues to everything from the origin of life on Earth to the formation of oil and gas.

Previously, microbes have been found living at a torrid 121 degrees Celsius around a volcanic vent on the seabed in the Pacific Ocean off the United States.

Scientists will now drill into rocks where temperatures reach 130 degrees in a two-month trip off southern Japan starting on Monday, said Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, of the University of Bremen in Germany who led the scientific proposal for the mission.

He reckoned life was likely to exist at temperatures around a maximum 85 to 90 degrees beneath the surface. He said there was probably less food in such rocks, heated by the molten core of the Earth, than near volcanoes on the seabed.

“But we’ve been surprised in these systems before. I wouldn’t bet any money on it,” he told reporters.

Water in the Nankai Trough is 4.7 kilometers deep and the scientists will drill another 1.2km into the Earth. Researchers reckon it is easier to prevent contamination of samples on a drilling ship than on land.

Scientists say they are discovering vast amounts of carbon-based life in the little understood subterranean zone.

Still, they reckon deep rocks are too disconnected from the surface to be exploited by humanity to soak up carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by human activities.

And the temperature limits of life are unclear.

“My guess is that 121 degrees is not the highest temperature at which life can grow and replicate,” Derek Lovley, a US scientist who helped identify Strain 121, a microbe that can reproduce at 121 degrees.

Lovley, of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who is not involved in the Japanese project, said it might be possible to adapt Strain 121 to higher temperatures and that other unknown life forms may live in even hotter places.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend