New Extremeophiles: live on sulfates (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 17, 2015, 14:21 (3380 days ago) @ David Turell

Beneath the ocean floor:-"Like the microbes on the forest floor that break down leaf litter and dead organisms, the microbes in the ocean also break down organic—that is, carbon-based—material like dead fish and algae. Unlike their counterparts, however, the microbes beneath the ocean crust often lack the oxygen that is used on land to effect the necessary chemical reaction.-"Instead, these microbes can use sulfate to break down carbon from decaying biological material that sinks to the sea bottom and makes its way into the crustal aquifer, producing carbon dioxide.-"Learning how these new microbes function will be important to getting a more accurate, quantified understanding of the overall global carbon cycle—a natural cycling of carbon through the environment in which it is consumed by plants, exhaled by animals and enters the ocean via the atmosphere."- Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-01-exotic-microbe-undersea-aquifer.html#jCp