Tiny Creatures that Live Underground May be The Answer to Climate Change

Tiny Creatures that Live Underground May be The Answer to Climate Change What weighs in at about 40 billion tonnes but is invisible to the naked eye?

Tiny Creatures that Live Underground May be The Answer to Climate Change.  What weighs in at about 40 billion tonnes but is invisible to the naked eye? The biggest underground biome in the planet. Next time you're outside, lay on the grass, the surface of planet Earth, and enjoy the energy of the setting sun. Close your eyes and allow yourself to think about what is underneath you. Because there, in the subsurface, you will find this living breathing mega biomass. A fascinating assortment of microorganisms exist there, and their ability to help mitigate climate change is slowly coming to light. The subsurface extends several kilometres into the rocky crust of earth. Cracks and fractures underground allow water to fill openings and the rock resembles a criss-cross pattern making the perfect place for an enormous ecosystem to thrive. It’s in these spaces that astronomical quantities of microbes live. At such a deep level, nutrients are usually absent, and if they do exist, their quantities are so low that we cannot even detect them. Lucky for microbes whose tiny size and slow movement require very little nutrients. Earth’s subsurface has an abundance of water and nutrients like nitrogen, iron and phosphorus – things we literally want to have more of in the surface world! However, there is no sunlight and a distinct lack of oxygen, so microbes need to use other respiration mechanisms and make their own food, but how? The answer is simple. A slow-moving rock eating chemolithoautotrophs – a microbe that uses chemicals to make food and to do something else that is quite magical. This savvy microbe gets food from elements like sulphur, iron, manganese, nitrogen, and carbon then after it has eaten its fill, it makes waste products like rust, pyrite and limestone. So, think of it like this. A chemolithoautotroph is a microbe that is really slow - like a rock - that gets its energy from rocks - and makes its waste product into other rocks!  But there’s more to this super microbe. As you’re aware earth makes its own carbon dioxide, but humans are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as well, in effect decreasing the ability of our planet to sustain life.  As I mentioned earlier chemolithoautotrophs get their food from many elements including carbon. So, questions arise - Are they helping to regulate the natural balance produced by earth? Will they be helpful to convert human-made carbon into solid carbonate minerals as they do underground? Can these meandering microbes help mitigate climate change? According to  article in Nature scientists believe microorganisms are crucial in regulating climate change.  The article suggests that it’s time to acknowledge the links between microorganisms and how they can help mitigate climate change. These amazing creatures could become allies in our global effort to curb carbon emissions and create an environmentally sustainable future.