[HN Gopher] Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest dept...
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Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest depths of hadal
trenches
Author : smartmic
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-07-30 18:20 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| narrator wrote:
| Good to know that there'd be something to reboot life if a giant
| meteorite hit the earth.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There are also microorganisms as deep down as we can drill
| underground.
|
| I've seen speculation that that's how life rebooted after
| ancient disasters.
|
| If life ever existed on Mars, I expect it's still there deep
| underground.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I think "ancient disasters" must be referring to the Late
| Heavy Bombardment, which is the only putative disaster I know
| of that could have sterilized the surface. Though it was
| supposed to fully re-liquefy the crust, so even underground
| life surviving would be dicey.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment
| maxbond wrote:
| It's possible life existed in the Hadean epoch before the
| Late Heavy Bombardment, but for the most part there are no
| rocks from the Hadean epoch so it's difficult to say
| whether there was life. Those rocks were swept into the
| mantle. There's a tiny bit of evidence for it from isotopic
| ratios within Zircon crystals which have survived that long
| (they are robust enough to survive the mantle and
| resurface), but it isn't definitive.
|
| Much like a sibling comment notes that we haven't been able
| to drill deep enough to find a depth without life, we
| haven't found rocks old enough to prove the nonexistence of
| life at any point in time, but if those rocks do exist they
| are no longer on Earth (eg they were ejected during an
| impact).
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Even the worst of Earth's exinction events, the Permian-
| Triassic extinction event (aka "The Great Dying"), didn't
| kill off _everything_ at surface level, even though that one
| did kill ~80% of marine species and ~70% of terrestial
| vertebrates.
|
| Earth's habitats have fluctuated wildly from changes in
| temperature, atmosphere, oceanic acidity, etc, but life is so
| diverse that some species have always been able to survive.
| It's basically a worst case scenario of "punctuated
| equilibrium" which is the norm for evolution - life doesn't
| evolve gradually in the way you were taught in high school
| but rather populations of species, and entire species, drift
| genetically over time, accumulating benign genetic changes
| until the environment changes in some major way (drought,
| disease, catastrophe) when their previously benign
| accumulated changes may prove to be critically beneficial,
| and other populations/species die off.
|
| Given how badly humans are currently messing up the planet,
| especially wrt self-inflicted global warming, I take some
| comfort in realizing that even if we manage to screw things
| up so badly that we go extinct, that life will find a way,
| and life on earth will - given enough time - bounce back in
| some new and interesting way.
| maxbond wrote:
| A giant meteor hit the earth 66 million years ago. Life uh,
| found a way.
| lawlessone wrote:
| If we have to start over from microbes there probably won't be
| enough time to reach where we are currently before the Sun's
| expansion wipes us out.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| hadal: relating to the zone of the sea greater than approximately
| 20,000 feet (6,000 m) in depth.
| hammock wrote:
| Thanks. Root of the word, Hades, obviously.
| r721 wrote:
| Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhXKrgdApw
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(page generated 2025-08-03 23:01 UTC)