Possible microbes in the Mariana Trench hint at life on Jupiter’s moon

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While exploring the Sirena Deep portion of the trench with a robotic lander, scientists found what they believe is evidence of a thriving microbial community clinging to the rocks in the abyss.

Microbes and larger organisms, such as shrimp-like amphipods, have been found in the mud of the Mariana Trench before. But unlike other living things in this deep watery realm, which subsist off the “marine snow” of dead organisms and debris drifting to the ocean floor, these microbes appear to feed off chemicals produced when seafloor rocks react with water, the team reports in the journal Deep-Sea Research I. 

Because they don’t rely on any life swimming above, these green, fuzzy mats affixed to rocky outcrops may offer clues about the kind of alien life-forms that could survive in the ocean depths of moons in the outer solar system, such as Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus.

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“It’s a glimpse of how life might exist billions of miles away from us, right now,” says study co-author, filmmaker, and National Geographic Explorer James Cameron in an email. “And it may also be a glimpse back through time, four billion years, to the dawn of life itself.”

The microbes likely represent the deepest chemosynthetic community ever discovered, feeding off the molecules released by geologic processes more than 6.5 miles beneath sea level.

“The discovery of this putative microbial ecosystem thriving on chemosynthesis in the deepest, darkest, highest pressure region of our ocean serves as a guide for the potential habitability within the ocean of Europa,” says Kevin Hand, a NASA astrobiologist, National Geographic Explorer, and lead author of the new study.

Source

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Meh still skeptical

 

Life that already existed on earth a planet with countless rare factors to support life may have started life than in turn also adapted to survive that way. But a planet or moon that only has those conditions seems less likely to actually start something

 

But who knows I could be wrong