http://www.weatherandclimate.com/wea....htm#footnote1
It's not a new discovery but either I hadn't paid attention to it or I missed it until tonight. The 'Blue Ocean' series on the Discovery channel tonight had a segment on unusual life. Anyway, they showed these areas deep in the ocean called 'cold seeps' where an ecosystem thrives based on bacteria consuming methane.
So we have hydrogen sulfide based ecosystems around undersea thermal vents and methane based ecosystems combined with hydrogen sulfide ecosystems in these weird 'cold seeps' as well.
The pictures of the cold seeps were incredible. There were 200 year old giant tube worms. There were huge matts of bivalves at a junction of very heavy brine layers under a layer of less dense water. The water divide acted like a lake with little or no mixing going on so the clams/muscles or whatever they were looked like land.
The program had some huge figures of new life forms discovered in the last 20 or so years. It was something on the order of a new species every week since 1979.
That makes two different chemical energy based ecosystems and one solar energy based system.
And we've explored less than 10% of the ocean floor according to the program. I might add to that the discovery that a large biomass appears to exist underground as well. After earthquakes around the San Juan de Fuca plate, a huge amount of bacteria have been observed being released into the ocean from underground. And, more underground sites are also revealing large amounts of bacteria.
I do so wish those Mars, Europa and ???? probes didn't take so long to plan, build, and get results from.
02-August-2003, 09:57 AM
Add another ecosystem on potential planets for ETs
Linear Mode
