Tubeworms live around deep-sea vents

marban | 83 points

There's a theory that life actually originated not directly through photosynthesis based life, but originally from a very constant source of energy - the earth's crust - Hyperthermophile archaea - using non-oxygen based metabolism which migrated to the surface where photosynthesis evolved and took over as the core energy source.

All laid out in Paul Davies' book - fascinating read: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Fifth-Miracle/Pau...

r00fus | 9 months ago

The study is here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52631-9

Lots of cool pictures if you like oceanography stuff.

blakesterz | 9 months ago

https://archive.is/I23NT - mirrored

I won't pretend to be a biologist, so forgive me if this is naïve, but this does feel like it's at least within the realm of possibility of working similarly on Europa, right? As in a non-zero chance at least.

ruleryak | 9 months ago

The title of the article is incorrect, the worms live in the crust, not "beneath the planetary crust" (in the magma).

The Economist magazine is not what it used to be, sadly.

RachelF | 9 months ago

The current HN title is, ah, underselling the find here. We already knew tubeworms live "around" vents.

andrewflnr | 9 months ago

Tjeerd van Andel — one of the original Alvin divers from Scripps — once told a group of us that their excitement at finding giant mussels around these smokers was both scientific and culinary. Large, rich and meaty, with a hint of Radon, apparently, which meant they had to limit their intake.

It’s a shame there weren’t any deep sea potatoes to complete the classic mosselen-friet / moules frites / mussel French fries combo.

gorgoiler | 9 months ago

Tube worms surviving an extreme environment is not the most interesting part of this tale. It's what they eat. Chemoautotrophs living at the edge of the vents are bacteria that can metabolise inorganic compounds such as sulfur, iron, or ammonia and produce ATP (sugar) which the tube worms consume. They can not only survive, they thrive in those environments. I have a feeling that chemoautotrophs or the plastic eating fungi will be the main long-term solutions to our plastic waste problem.

ogou | 9 months ago

my personal take on evolution,is based on two fact like pieces of information, first is that life can perhaps be seen as extreamly complex assemblies of matter and energy and second that the universe is a vast field of energy gradients with a general mish mash of all of the possible elements of matter lodged in a variety of disks,spheres,blobs,and ribbons, leaving much of it open for life to work in some form which is just a re phaseing of what many have suggested is the feeling of the inevitability of life,which I might add,is miracle enough

metalman | 9 months ago

paywall'd

bityard | 9 months ago

Are we in the Dune timeline?

1egg0myegg0 | 9 months ago