Scientists Found 100-Million-Year-Old Lifeforms Under Pacific Floor — Then They 'Revived' It

From fish living deep in the ocean for several years to creatures that even survive in boiling springs and freezing ice-cold temperatures, living beings often astonish us in ways we might have never even imagined. These little discoveries also remind us that Earth is full of hidden secrets, many of which remain to be uncovered. For instance, in a discovery that felt little like reality, scientists have successfully found a community microorganism that has been trapped beneath the ocean floor for over 100 million years.

The research titled 'Aerobic microbial life persists in toxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years' was published by Nature Communications in 2020. In July 2020, scientists from the University of Rhode Island and Japan’s Marine-Earth Science and Technology agency retrieved these microbes from the South Pacific. They drilled down around 75 meters into the seafloor, at a depth of almost 5,700 meters beneath the ocean’s surface, to collect the sediment samples, which lacked any kind of nutrients. Despite this, the tiny microbes managed to stay alive for millions of years due to the small amount of oxygen available, as reported by the BBC.

Not just this, a professor at the University of Rhode Island and an author of the study, Steven D'Hondt, claimed that these microbes can also multiply in numbers. He said, "In the oldest sediment we've drilled, with the least amount of food, there are still living organisms, and they can wake up, grow, and multiply." He added, “We believe the community has remained there for 100 million years, with an unknown number of generations. Since the calculated energy flux for subseafloor sedimentary microbes is barely sufficient for molecular repair, the number of generations could be inconceivably low.”

When these microbes were placed in lab incubators, a few of them quickly became active, multiplying more than ten thousand times within just a span of 68 days. Another author of the study, Yuki Morono, spoke about the findings and said, "When I found them, I was first skeptical whether the findings were from some mistake or a failure in the experiment." He added, "We now know that there is no age limit for [organisms in the] sub-seafloor biosphere." Scientists once believed life existed only a few meters below the seafloor, but this study shows it’s far more widespread and surprising than expected, as reported by IFLScience.

Morono also revealed that microbes living deep in the seabed survive on energy millions of times lower than what surface microbes might require. Their levels are so low that surface organisms couldn’t survive even for some time, making it a mystery how these deep-sea microbes live. Meanwhile, as reported by The Guardian, previous studies have also revealed that bacteria are capable of surviving in some of the harshest environments on Earth. For example, they have been found living near undersea hydrothermal vents, where conditions are extreme—no sunlight, crushing pressures, and in several cases, little to no oxygen.

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