Life found in ocean depths
p2pnet.net OT News:- Remember James Cameron‘s The Abyss where the heroes find amazing life-forms living in the terrible depths of the ocean?
In Cameron’s film, the creatures are aliens but fiction has, to an extent, become fact.
Single-celled creatures, many of them previously unknown to science, have been found at the deepest point in the world’s oceans, says the BBC. “The soft-walled foraminifera, a form of plankton, were recovered by the Japanese remote submersible Kaiko.”
The discovery is reported in Science magazine, says the Beeb, going on that the organisms exist in the Marianas Trench, known as Challenger Deep.
“This hole in the ocean floor is totally dark and the immense column of water above pushes down with a force that is over a thousand times greater than that at the surface – about 110,000 kilopascals,” it says.
“Foraminifera are thought to be the most abundant form of life in the seas after bacteria. They typically have shells, but these organisms are soft because there is insufficient calcium carbonate at such depth to build hard parts.”
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See:-
fact – Life flourishes at crushing depth, BBC News Online, February 4, 2005
February 5th, 2005 at 9:25 pm
That’s nothing.
How about life in a freshwater lake the size of the great lakes of North America under 4 km of ice underneath Vostok station in Antarctica?
Now THAT’s impressive.
http://news.surfwax.com/geography/files/Lake_Vostok.html
Life in Extreme Environments: Antarctica
http://www.resa.net/nasa/antarctica.htm
February 5th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Or how about the single-cell organisms multiplying crazily in the murky depths of the RIAA?
That’s impressive too. heh
Cheers!