New discovery helps us to realize what life would look like in places with similar characteristics outside the earth.
The microbes that live under the antarctic ice cloak can survive with the methane generated by the geothermal heat that rises from the depths of the earth’s surface. Thus discovered the authors of one published in the EarthArXiv.
“They can be hot points for microbes that are adapted to living in these areas,” says Gavin Piccione, a researcher at the University of Brown in Rhode Island.
In fact, it was already known that there are methane under the ice of Antarctica, but what had been discovered so far was generated by other microbes that broke the organic matter in the first meters of sediment underneath the ice.
Now the researchers have realized that this methane comes from a different origin. In fact, it is the geothermal heat that slowly decomposes organic matter buried to greater depth under the ice cloak.
“Access to rocky registration in Antarctica is extremely difficult,” says Piccione, but the study was done using Carbon isotopes collected in two different locations.
The isotopes revealed that the methane was geotormally generated at temperatures of about 20 ° C. “That is too hot For any subglassing water, ”comments the scientist.
This is the investigators, the first proof that methane forms under the ice cloak. “What this probably means is that any estimate we have of the amount of methane under the ice is probably too low“.
This Quality could increase the potential size of the habitable zone for microbes under the ice. “Under a layer of ice, energy options are really limited.”
This study is still important to realize how life would work in similar cold environments, for example on the moon of Jupiter, Europe. PICCIANE COMMENTS THAT Antarctica “is our best analog for what may happen to life in another cold world”.
