Nearly half of the living material on our planet is hidden deep under ground or under water. Science calls this world of deep dwelling life the “subsurface biosphere” a dark place where light from the sun and stars has never fallen. Or, for those who want to be less technical about it, “Earth’s basement.”
“Earth’s habitable zone extends to the depths of hundreds or thousands of meters,” Katrina Edwards a microbiologist at Univeristy of Southern California, Los Angeles, said in a speech at the American Geophysical Union conference in December in San Francisco. “The organisms that live in this environment may collectively have a mass equivalent of that of all Earth’s surface dwellers and may provide keys to solving major environmental, agricultural and industrial problems.”
Which is why marine geologists are about to launch a major exploration of the subsurface and the “intra-terrestrial life” they hope to encounter there. In July, the internationally funded Integrated Ocean Drilling Program will start the process of placing long term “observatory” units deep beneath the ocean. Eventually this network of six planned undersea stations will create a comprehensive data collection stream for scientists who will be “sitting in front of a fire hose of data,” as Andrew Fischer of the University of Santa Cruz puts it.
Studying the subsurface may teach us a lot about life on other planets as well. ”It is highly likely that if Mars supports life, it will also be in a deep biosphere where temperatures are high enough to allow liquid water.” John Parnell, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland points out. So not only will studying what’s inside our planet help us understand Earth, it will understand what might live amongst our stars as well.
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