MICROBES LIVE NEAR UNDERSEA CO LAKE: Discovery of unusual microbial ecosystem has astrobiological implications

A LAKE OF LIQUID CARBON dioxide and a microbial ecosystem that exists in association with it under the seafloor have been uncovered by scientists. The story began two years ago as the research submersible Shinkai 6500 and its crew prowled about at a depth of nearly 1,400 meters in a hydrothermal field of scorching black-smoker vents in the Okinawa Trough. The scientists inside noticed something strange, even for that locale. Downslope from one of the vents, they saw clear, vapor-rich fluid bleeding upward from white patchy areas of sediment. When they extracted a core for analysis from one of these spots, it was as though they had uncorked a pressurized canister—a continuous fizz of bubbles shot upward. In the support ship's onboard laboratory, Fumio Inagaki of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology, in Yokosuka, and his colleagues began to get an inkling of just how odd was the place they had been. The ...