Incredibly Weird Microbes Found Deep Underground Could Change Search for Life on Mars
Incredibly Weird Microbes Found Deep Underground Could Change Search for Life on Mars
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | October 3, 2018 08:10am ET
Life on Earth just got weirder, and that may have intriguing implications for life beyond this planet.
That's one takeaway from new research that identified cyanobacteria — a class of microbes known for turning sunlight into sugar — living deep below Earth's surface, far away from any ray of sunlight.
Because they're so tiny, cyanobacteria don't always get much love, but they're what turned Earth from an inhospitable rock (to us, anyway) into a green, growing world and first put the oxygen we rely on into the atmosphere. "What the cyanobacteria have invented has been brilliantly important through the history of life on Earth," Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California not involved in the new research, told Space.com. [Photos: Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life]
"They were able to turn our Earth into a place that is habitable for the animals that evolved here," Rothschild said. She called cyanobacteria "one-stop shopping" for turning what was easily accessible about 2.7 billion years ago in the early days of Earth — compounds like water and carbon dioxide — into the oxygen and sugar that animals need to survive. Some cyanobacteria can even turn the nitrogen that makes up most of our atmosphere into biologically useful ammonia.
More:
https://www.space.com/42001-weird-underground-microbes-aid-mars-life-search.html
