Bacteria found living 2 miles underground
San Francisco Chronicle
Oct. 20, 2006
By David Perlman
Scientists descending more than 2 miles into the hot, fractured rocks of a South African gold mine have discovered clans of microbes that have thrived there in total isolation for millions of years.
Their quest, the scientists say, reveals more clearly than ever how life can exist in the most extreme environments imaginable: beneath the surface of Mars, perhaps, or on almost any other planet in the galaxy.
The ancient bacteria exist in an environment that scientists describe as by far the most outlandish for any organisms ever found -- they are long removed from life-giving sunlight and living only on sulfate minerals and hydrogen split from water by uranium's radioactivity.
Teams of other researchers have long found "extremophile" microbes in the boiling geysers of Yellowstone National Park, on erupting volcanoes in rifts on the ocean floor, in the high desert of the Andes, in acidic springs and polar ice caps -- but the bacteria beat them all for their extreme lifestyle.
Read the entire article at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/20/MNGJ9LT21J1.DTL
Read the Washington Post's story at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR2006101901671_2.html
