Living Bacteria Found Beneath Antarctic Ice

DISCOVERY SUGGESTS LIFE COULD EXIST ELSEWHERE

By John Johnson, Newser Staff
http://www.newser.com/story/162441/livi ... c-ice.html
Posted Feb 7, 2013 2:33 PM CST


(NEWSER) – Scientists drilled through a half-mile of ice into an Antarctic lake and found what is believed to be a first: live bacteria, reports the New York Times. The discovery is intriguing because if the cells can survive there, they could theoretically survive on a frozen planet somewhere. More research is under way to find out one crucial detail: Where is the bacteria getting its food?

“If it’s just consuming organics carried in from elsewhere"—a melting glacier, for example, "it is of much less interest," explains a NASA scientist. But if the cells are feeding off material that comes from a "local energy source," such as minerals in the continent's rock, that's a different story. Extraterrestrial life would likely have to do the same.

http://www.wissard.org/

One of the things I recently learned is that microbes in reducing environments use donor ions for energy by snipping electrons from the outer shell. For example, Uranium in its oxidized state is highly soluble and occurs in various combinations with carbonate radicals in the ocean. Get it on the seafloor a few mm below the sediment water interface and microbe begin stippling a couple of electrons off it for metabolic functions. Simply amazing. There is a zoo of these types of microbes at work everywhere. It is a competitive job. Because different donor ions hold onto their electrons more tightly than others do, not every reducing microbe can use any donor species. Instead they have neat zone arrangements where the most powerful "strippers" occur where the hardest to deal with donors end up. I bet that is quite the act to see Lol. After seeing this and the involvement of microbes in making minerals n all kinds of harsh environments , nothing surprises me. It is only a question of when will we recognize one from an alien world. i'm certain they are out there.

Since it looks like life exists in pretty adverse Earth enviroments, would it be ethical to seed neighboring planets with Earth organisms? So far on Mars, we have only found conditions favorable for life, but no real life.

Awesome, thanks for posting!

I think it will take actual humans on the ground for us to determine if life exists on Mars. Hopefully it isn't that far off.

What is seen as harmful radiation by some organism may be the ticket for thriving by others. Think of the hydrothermal vents and the view prior to their discovery of life forms that are dong very well despite not adhering to our preconceived notions of what is suitable environment for life. The problem has log been thinking in terms of our narrow perspective on what constitutes a suitable environment. For that matter what is life? Is there a form of life that does not follow our definition of it?

Rockdoc wrote: What is seen as harmful radiation by some organism may be the ticket for thriving by others. Think of the hydrothermal vents and the view prior to their discovery of life forms that are dong very well despite not adhering to our preconceived notions of what is suitable environment for life. The problem has log been thinking in terms of our narrow perspective on what constitutes a suitable environment. For that matter what is life? Is there a form of life that does not follow our definition of it?

Indeed. Why not silicon based lifeforms or methane etc. SF is rift with other examples. I think it is SF that has given me a broad non ethnocentric perspective. It is so stupid to divide ourselves along ethnic, racial, religious lines when the universe might be so much bigger.