Mysterious 'zombie' ecosystem discovered deep beneath the Earth's crust

A mysterious ecosystem has been found within the Earth’s subsurface and it is baffling scientists.

The amazing discovery was made by a team of scientists involved with the Deep Carbon Observatory research programme, who set about digging within the Earth’s subsurface – the region which exists beneath the planet’s crust – to examine "deep life".

During their research, they discovered that there is a huge amount of carbon, as well as “barely living zombie bacteria” which came as a shock.

The team’s findings were shared at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in 2018, where they explained that drilled between 2.5km and 5 km into the seafloor, taking samples from several continents and seas.

Using samples of “microbes from continental mines and boreholes more than 5 km deep”, the experts were able to construct models of the biosphere beneath the Earth’s surface. The total area of this biosphere is believed to be between two to 2.3 billion cubic km.

The biosphere, dubbed a “subterranean Galapagos” is largely comprised of two types of microbes, bacteria and archaea. The biosphere contains 23 billion tonnes of organisms and is almost twice as big as all the world’s oceans.

Isabelle Daniel, a mineralogist at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France, said in a statement: “A decade ago, we had no idea that the rocks beneath our feet could be so vastly inhabited.”

She added: “Experimental investigations told us that microbes could potentially survive to great depth, but at that time, we had no evidence.”

Over 1000 experts worked on the project and found a whole host of “microbial dark matter”, which is the name given to populations of cells that are unable to be grown or cultured in a lab due to their incredibly slow replication or difficult growing conditions.

Despite being in pitch darkness and nutrient-scarce environments, an incredible 70 per cent of the Earth’s bacteria and archaea live in these extreme places.

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