A chemical trick for making oxygen can sustain whole underground ecosystems
Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent most of the planet’s microbial mass and whose diversity may exceed that of surface-dwelling life forms.
The new study looked at deep aquifers in the Canadian province of Alberta, which has such rich deposits of underground tar, oil sands and hydrocarbon that it has been dubbed “the Texas of Canada.” Because its huge cattle farming and agriculture industries rely heavily on groundwater, the provincial government actively monitors the water’s acidity and chemical composition. Yet no one had systematically studied the groundwater microbiology.
A pattern in the numbers puzzled them. Usually, in surveys of the sediment under the seafloor, for example, scientists find that the number of microbial cells decreases with depth: Older, deeper samples can’t sustain as much life because they are more cut off from the nutrients made by photosynthetic plants and algae near the surface. But to the surprise of Ruff’s team, the older, deeper groundwaters held more cells than the fresher waters did.
If the dissolved oxygen did not come from contamination, where did it come from? Ruff realized that he was on the brink of something big, even though making controversial claims ran against his nature. Many of his co-authors had doubts too: The finding threatened to shatter the foundation of our understanding of subsurface ecosystems.
While working in a lab in the Netherlands in the late 2000s, Strous noticed that a type of methane-feeding bacteria often found in lake sediments and wastewater sludges had a strange way of life. Instead of taking in oxygen from its surroundings like other aerobes, the bacteria created its own oxygen by using enzymes to break down the soluble compounds called nitrites . The bacteria used the self-generated oxygen to split methane for energy.
Understanding what lives in the subsurface of our planet is also “crucial for translating that knowledge elsewhere,” Sherwood Lollar said. The soil of Mars, for instance, contains perchlorate compounds that some Earth microbes can turn into chloride and oxygen. Jupiter’s moon Europa has a deep, frozen ocean; sunlight may not penetrate it, but oxygen could potentially be produced there by microbial dismutation instead of photosynthesis.
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