Published on August 8th 2014
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| Liquid oil bubbles up to the surface of Trinidad's Pitch Lake, the world's largest asphalt lake. |
Tiny habitats hidden within oil could expand the potential for life in the universe, researchers say.
Scientists have
discovered microbes living in microscopic droplets of water inside a
giant asphalt lake on Earth, suggesting that alien life could exist within ponds of sludge on distant landscapes such as Saturn's largest moon Titan.
Researchers investigated
the largest naturally occurring asphalt lake on Earth, Pitch Lake on
the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Black goo there oozes across roughly
114 acres (0.46 square kilometers), an area equivalent to nearly 90
football fields. [See Photos of Pitch Lake and 'Alien Life' Oil Droplets]
Previous studies had found that
microbes could thrive at the boundary where oil and water meet in
nature, helping to break down the oil. However, investigators had
thought oil was too toxic for life, and that the levels of any water
inside the oil were below the threshold for life on Earth.
"Oil was considered to
be dead,"said lead study author Rainer Meckenstock, an environmental
microbiologist at Helmholtz Zentrum München in Germany.
Now scientists have found microbes active within Pitch Lake, dwelling inside water droplets
as small as 1 microliter, about one-fiftieth the size of an average
drop of water. "Each of these water droplets basically contains a little
mini-ecosystem,"study co-author Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist
at Washington State University in Pullman, told Live Science.
These droplets contain a
diverse group of microbial species that are breaking the oil down into a
variety of organic molecules. The chemistry of the droplets suggests
this water does not come from rain, but from ancient seawater, or brine from deep underground.
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