Skip to main content

Strange Life Has Been Found Trapped Inside These Giant Cave Crystals


A NASA scientist just woke them up.

Strange microbes have been found inside the massive, subterranean crystals of Mexico's Naica Mine, and researchers suspect they've been living there for up to 50,000 years.
The ancient creatures appear to have been dormant for thousands of years, surviving in tiny pockets of liquid within the crystal structures. Now, scientists have managed to extract them - and wake them up.

"These organisms are so extraordinary," astrobiologist Penelope Boston, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston. 
The Cave of Crystals in Mexico's Naica Mine might look incredibly beautiful, but it's one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, with temperatures ranging from 45 to 65°C (113 to 149°F), and humidity levels hitting more than 99 percent.
Not only are temperatures hellishly high, but the environment is also oppressively acidic, and confined to pitch-black darkness some 300 metres (1,000 feet) below the surface.


In lieu of any sunlight, microbes inside the cave can't photosynthesise - instead, they perform chemosynthesis using minerals like iron and sulphur in the giant gypsum crystals, some of which stretch 11 metres (36 feet) long, and have been dated to half a million years old.
Researchers have previously found life living inside the walls of the cavern and nearby the crystals - a 2013 expedition to Naica reported the discovery of creatures thriving in the hot, saline springs of the complex cave system.

But when Boston and her team extracted liquid from the tiny gaps inside the crystals and sent them off to be analysed, they realised that not only was there life inside, but it was unlike anything they'd seen in the scientific record.
They suspect the creatures had been living inside their crystal castles for somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 years, and while their bodies had mostly shut down, they were still very much alive.
"Other people have made longer-term claims for the antiquity of organisms that were still alive, but in this case these organisms are all very extraordinary - they are not very closely related to anything in the known genetic databases," Boston told Jonathan Amos at BBC News.
What's perhaps most extraordinary about the find is that the researchers were able to 'revive' some of the microbes, and grow cultures from them in the lab.
"Much to my surprise we got things to grow," Boston told Sarah Knapton at The Telegraph. "It was laborious. We lost some of them - that's just the game. They've got needs we can't fulfil."
At this point, we should be clear that the discovery has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so until other scientists have had a chance to examine the methodology and findings, we can't consider the discovery be definitive just yet.
The team will also need to convince the scientific community that the findings aren't the result of contamination - these microbes are invisible to the naked eye, which means it's possible that they attached themselves to the drilling equipment and made it look like they came from inside the crystals. 
"I think that the presence of microbes trapped within fluid inclusions in Naica crystals is in principle possible," Purificación López-García from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who was part of the 2013 study that found life in the cave springs, told National Geographic.
"[But] contamination during drilling with microorganisms attached to the surface of these crystals or living in tiny fractures constitutes a very serious risk," she says. I am very skeptical about the veracity of this finding until I see the evidence."
That said, microbiologist Brent Christner from the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was also not involved in the research, thinks the claim isn't as far-fetched as López-García is making it out to be, based on what previous studies have managed with similarly ancient microbes.
"[R]eviving microbes from samples of 10,000 to 50,000 years is not that outlandish based on previous reports of microbial resuscitations in geological materials hundreds of thousands to millions of years old," he told National Geographic.
For their part, Boston and her team say they took every precaution to make sure their gear was sterilised, and cite the fact that the creatures they found inside the crystals were similar, but not identical to those living elsewhere in the cave as evidence to support their claims.
"We have also done genetic work and cultured the cave organisms that are alive now and exposed, and we see that some of those microbes are similar but not identical to those in the fluid inclusions," she said.
Only time will tell if the results will bear out once they're published for all to see, but if they are confirmed, it's just further proof of the incredible hardiness of life on Earth, and points to what's possible out there in the extreme conditions of space.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Where the Swastika Was Found 12,000 Years Before Hitler Made Us Uncomfortable About I

Minoan pottery from Crete. The Minoan civilization flourished from 3,000 to 1,100 B.C. (Agon S. Buchholz/Wikimedia Commons) ) Swastika from a 2nd century A.D. Roman mosaic. (Maciej Szczepańczyk/Wikimedia Commons A srivatsa (swastika) sign at Nata-dera Temple, Japan. (Cindy Drukier/Epoch Times) From the Sican/Lambayeque civilization in Peru, which flourished 750 to 1375 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons) Ancient Macedonian helmet with swastika marks, 350-325 B.C., found at Herculanum. (Cabinet des Medailles, Paris/Wikimedia Commons) A Buddha statue on Lantau Island, Hong Kong with a swastika symbol on the chest. (Shutterstock*) A 3,000-year-old necklace found in the Rasht Province of Iran. (Wikimedia Commons) The aviator Matilde Moisant(1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators. (Wikimedia Commons) A mandala-like swastika, composed of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a circle and a mystica...

There’s a Previously Undiscovered Organ in Your Body, And It Could Explain How Cancer Spreads

Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone  —  scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what  —  you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a recent study published  in  Scientific Reports , Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. That’s what they saw when they looked at it in the lab, outside the body, at least. But in a routine endoscopy (exploration of the gastrointestinal tract), a micro camera revealed something unexpected: When observed in a living body, the connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise  told  Research Gate . This network of channels is present throughout ...

20,000 megawatts under the sea: Oceanic steam engines

Jules Verne mused about getting energy from heat in the ocean  (Image: Marc Pagani/Getty) Jules Verne imagined this limitless power source in Victorian times – now 21st-century engineers say heat trapped in the oceans could provide electricity for the world IF ANY energy source is worthy of the name "steampunk", it is surely ocean thermal energy conversion. Victorian-era science fiction? Check: Jules Verne mused about its potential in  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea  in 1870. Mechanical, vaguely 19th-century technology? Check. Compelling candidate for renewable energy in a post-apocalyptic future? Tick that box as well. Claims for it have certainly been grandiose. In theory, ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) could provide  4000 times the world's energy needs in any given year , with neither pollution nor greenhouse gases to show for it. In the real world, however, it has long been written off as impractical. This year, a surprising number of pro...