A recent survey beneath the Great Lakes found that, deep down below all that calm, shimmering water, there’s an entire underground world packed with rock-eating fungi, microscopic worms, and even tardigrades. And those adorable little “water bears” that somehow manage to survive in volcanoes and in the vacuum of space, places where regular bears would perhaps not fare as well.
According to a new study published in The ISME Journal, the earth beneath the Great Lakes has apparently been hiding a bizarre menagerie of all the little freaks who help make the world go.
Researchers from the University of Michigan analyzed water pulled from gas wells drilled 650 to 1,650 feet into the Antrim Shale, a massive rock formation beneath the Great Lakes. The water itself dates back roughly 11,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age, when melting glaciers carried fungi and bacteria deep into underground reservoirs.
It didn’t die off. Instead, they hunkered down, made a home for themselves, and started eating all the rock around them to survive.
A Secret Underground Ecosystem Is Living Beneath the Great Lakes Region
The team identified 689 fungal species, including 13 never before seen by science. Just one drop of ancient, discussed contained about 200 fungal cells, which is hovering around the same density found in ocean water. There were also tiny segmented worms and, of course, the beloved, ever-so-small tardigrades, altogether forming a vast interconnected underground food web where everyone lives in harmony when they aren’t eating each other.
Why is this important? Does this kind of thing exist everywhere? Well, for a while there, scientists assumed that complex organisms detected deep underground were either dead, dormant, or in transition from one place to another. To have kind of biodiversity in a hidden ecosystem far beneath our feet, and has apparently been there for thousands of years? That’s an interesting find. Especially since it isn’t fueled by sunlight and only seems to subsist on the organic material locked inside 380 million-year-old shale.
It’s not quite like finding dinosaurs in Earth’s core, as in Journey To The Center Of The Earth, but close, as long as you scale it all down significantly. But still, it’s the stuff that fantastical adventures are made of, or at least act as the basis of.
The post Scientists Found a Hidden World of Fungi, Worms, and Tardigrades Beneath the Great Lakes appeared first on VICE.
