Earthquakes don鈥檛 always mean death and destruction 鈥� at least for the microbes deep in the crust. Regular rumblings could be what enables them to stay alive, and maybe even Martian bugs too.
Earth鈥檚 crust is known to host hardy bacteria even several kilometres below the surface. These cells have no sun or organic material to sustain them, so they feed off the chemical energy in reactive molecules like hydrogen dissolved in the water seeping out of the rock. This means their growth and survival is limited by the flow of nutrients from deeper sources.
Now Norman Sleep and Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California say that earthquakes could provide these nutrients. The researchers鈥� calculations show that seismic events would happen regularly enough to ensure a dependable supply of food right across a tectonic plate, sustaining microbial life for billions of years. ().
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Earthquakes would open up cracks in the crust, they say, releasing pockets of deeper nutrient-rich water and exposing fresh rock that would further drive the chemical reactions that release molecules like hydrogen.
This mechanism might also keep microbes supplied with nutrients deep in the single-plate crust of Mars, they say.
Astrobiology 鈥� Learn more in our out-of-this-world .
