14 DAY TRIAL // A team of scientists led by expert Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent managed to discover some amazing creatures recently. They identified multicellular, complex organisms living as much as 1 kilometer under the crust of the planet.
Investigators were conducting researches deep down in order to understand how life first appeared and developed on our planet. Their investigations may have implications for exobiology and astrobiology.
If life can endure beneath Earth's crust, then there's nothing preventing it from enduring at the same location on other celestial bodies, such as for example Mars, or the Saturnine moons Enceladus and Titan, the researchers say.
Working with Tullis Onstott of Princeton University, the UG researcher was able to discover organisms that featured digestive tracts, nervous systems, and reproductive organs. This degree of complexity was once thought impossible for creatures living so deep underground.
“If life did originate on Mars and if it had sufficient time to go underground deep enough to survive worsening conditions, then evolution of Martian life might have continued underground. […] Life on Mars could be more complex than we imagined,” Borgonie says.
The organisms discovered by the research team are of the nematode group, which are also known as roundworms. They were discovered as experts were conducted deep drills in South African mines.
Gold mines in this country are extremely deep and, once disused, they can provide the perfect grounds for particle detectors or microbiologists looking for new organisms. A couple of years ago, experts found bacteria feeding off the natural radioactive decay of uranium in such a mine.
But the new discovery “is telling us something brand new. For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable,” Onstott explains. He and his colleague detailed their research in the latest issue of the top scientific journal Nature.
One of the worms, of the species Halicephalobus mephisto, was discovered one mile below the surface of the Beatrix gold mine, in a stream of flowing water, Daily Galaxy reports. Until now, no nematodes were ever found at depths below 10 or 20 feet (3 to 6 meters).
“What we found shows that harsh conditions do not necessarily exclude complexity,” Borgonie says.
The research raises hopes that astronomers will one day be able to discover life on other planets. Mars, Enceladus, Titan, and many other bodies outside our solar system, may have had conditions similar to early Earth's at one point in their history.
If that is true, and life evolved there as it did here, than the descendants of those organisms might still be alive today. Recent studies have pushed the boundaries between which life can endure even further.