Nature Knows 06 - Extremophiles

Some scientists conclude that life may have begun on Earth in hydrothermal vents far beneath the ocean's surface. spores and cocooned bacteria have been dormant, still live for forty million years or more that are hardened to radiation. bacteria have been found in a lake, cold and dark, half-a-mile deep under the ice in Antarctica and in Marianas Trench, the deepest spot on earth, with pressure over a thousand one hundred bars. microbial life has great flexibility for surviving in extreme environments like niches that are acidic, too hot, with too high pressure etc. that are completely inhospitable to complex organisms like man. (2) the sun may run out of its fuel, hydrogen in five and a half billion years, though its brightness increases by ten per cent every billion years in a billion years from now, the earth will be so hot that oceans would dry up and of course no liquid water remains on its surface man would be extinct, with most other species, much before that but extremophiles, the microorganisms discussed above, would survive. with all the technology we have now and that will be developed further man may not find another planet habitable and within reach, but the extremophiles will. Nature knows! Notes: 1. hydrothermal vents= naturally occurring hot springs on the ocean floor that are created when seawater is heated by magma and released onto the surface. Temperature about 700 degrees F and pressure 250 atm. 2. Bar= (a unit of pressure) 100,000 pascals. ‘pascal' (Pa) is the International System of Units (SI) of pressure. One pascal is equal to one newton (N) of force applied over an area of one square meter.