Re: News: New life beneath sea and ice

From: "Robert Karl Stonjek" <rston...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
... under the Antarctic ice ***, and above concentrated salt
lakes beneath the Mediterranean. ... In both cases, innumerable
tiny microbes are fixing or holding onto quantities of organic
carbon large enough to be significant in the global carbon cycle.

See my warning later below.

The largest subglacial lake, Lake Vostok, lies beneath the
coldest place on the planet, where the temperature at the surface
often falls below 60 C.

That should read *minus* 60 C, right?

"It's the sixth largest freshwater lake on the planet by volume,
and about the size of Lake Ontario," says Christner. "If you were
on a boat in the middle of the lake, you would not see shores."

Who cares about seeing the horizon, when the ceiling is crushing
your head? Is there *any* air pocket above the water and under the
ice that would even allow a boat to float there?

Based on accumulating measurements of microbes in the subglacial
environment, he calculates that the concentration of cell and
organic carbon in the Earth's ice sheets, or 'cryosphere', may be
hundreds of times higher than what is found in all the planet's
freshwater systems. "Glacial ice is not currently considered as a
reservoir for organic carbon and biology," says Christner, "but
that view has to change."

My dire warning now: If global warming melts all the Antarctic ice
cap, all that biomass will be "suddenly" released into the ocean,
killing all that life due to sudden change in environment. That
biomass will be promptly eaten by a bloom of zooplankton,
converting most of it to carbon dioxide to saturate the local water
and bubble into the atmosphere, creating a Venus-like
global-warming positive-feedback loop.

Before that could happen, we need to tap into that biomass frozen
into the overlaying ice, excavating it after it leaves those lakes
but before it reaches the shore to break off into the ocean. The
excavated biomass can then be fed to methane-producing bacteria and
the methane harvested to replace most of our current use of fossil
petrolium, thereby preventing most of the extra carbon-dioxide
pollution. The ice sheets flow over varying rocky terrain before
they reach the ocean, and we might take advantage of this terrain
to find an optimal location to pump enough steam into the bottom of
the ice *** to completely melt a region of the bottom of the ice
*** to form a "bubble" of liquid which can then be pumped out by
traditional Richfield (now ARCO) technique used in southern
California (advertised/bragged on TV ads during the last 1950's)
whereby additional steam is pumped in to drive the last of the
petrolium or natural gas out. We might even pump down a mix of hot
steam and culture of methane-producing bacteria, so that in the
nice warm bubble of melt under the ice the bacteria can produce
methane in situ and so then we just pump out the methane already
produced, so we don't need to build any above-ground
methane-production tanks. Anybody from ARCO, which probably has a
patent on the process, reading this thread and want to make a lot
of money and save the environment at the same time, and of course
arrange a joint patent between myself and ARCO so that we can share
royalties on my invention (value-added to ARCO's original SoCal
invention), and then I can stop living in poverty??

Beneath the Mediterranean ... anoxic hypersaline basins, on the
floor of the Mediterranean. They have discovered extremely
diverse microbial communities on the surfaces of such lakes. ...
"Because of the very high density of the brine, it does not mix
with seawater," he explains, "and there is a sharp interface,
about 1m thick."

Um, for bacteria, that's an *immense* distance!! There are probably
multiple ecosystems at different depths from top to bottom of this
transitional layer, just like in moist soil where there is a whole
food chain between anoxic bacteria at the bottom and aerobic
bacteria at the top. Each strain of bacteria is probably
constrained to one narrow layer where the salinity and oxygenation
is optimal for that strain, interacting only with co-residents of
the same layer and nearest neighbors in adjacent layers above and
below. It's even conceivable that the difference in salinity
between adjacent layers might be used as an energy source by some
bacteria, which would tend to increase "diffusion" of salt to a
faster rate than natural thus widening the thickness of the
transition layer, thus allowing a larger volume of life to exist
without crowding, a form of "Gaia" at the local level. The effect
would be self-limiting because the wider the transition region is
the lesser the steepness of gradient hence the lower the
effectiveness of using the gradient as an energy source because it
takes more energy to swim back and forth to exchange salt and
water. If so, I would expect the gradient to be about the same
throughout this region, somewhat independent of bottom-topography
and other factors that would naturally increase or decrease the
thickness of the transitional region.

In that layer, microbial diversity is incredibly rich. The
research shows that these microbes largely live by sulphide
oxidation. Like the communities at hydrothermal vents in the deep
ocean, they can survive independently of sunlight and oxygen. But
they are an important store for organic carbon. "The deep-sea
microbial communities in the Mediterranean fix as much or even more
carbon dioxide each year as those in the surface layers," says
Yakimov. "This carbon sink should be taken into account at the
global scale."

Fortunately it'll be about one billion years before increating
solar energy output boils the oceans and thereby kills all that
microbial life and releases the carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Let's worry about Antarctica first, OK?

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Thanks for posting. It's very interesting, and possibly
important/urgent over the next twenty years to get moving on the
Richfield/Maas or other technique for preventing massive
carbon-dioxide release from Antarctica.

.

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