Life existed 1500 m below Earth 65 mn years ago in India, IIT-KGP discovers

Kolkata, Jan. 21 (PTI): Researchers from IIT Kharagpur have discovered that life existed 1500 metres below the Earth’s surface around 65 million years ago in India as we know it now.

The scientists found microbial – bacterial and archaeal – life forms at such depths beneath the Deccan Traps which cover a large part of the Deccan Plateau in Southern and Western India.

Archaea is a micro-organism similar to bacteria in size but radically different in molecular organisation.

The Deccan Traps were formed by massive volcanic activities nearly 65 million years ago and believed to be responsible for mass extinction on our planet.

What surprised the research team was the presence of the bacteria and archaea more than a kilometer below the solid igneous rocks – formed by solidification of lava or magma – without much of nutritional resources such as water or other materials to feed on, an IIT KGP statement said Monday

In 2014, Prof Pinaki Sar from the Department of Biotechnology at the IIT KGP initiated this research to study the geo-microbiological properties of these rocks which remained disconnected from sun-lit surface environment rich in oxygen, water, organics and light to drive photo-synthesis.

Rock cores retrieved from three such exploratory boreholes were sampled for this geo-microbiological investigation, the statement said.

The IIT KGP researchers suggest that the microbes may have moved down to the lower strata of the Earth through water flow through fractures in rocks formed due to seismic activities, the statement said.

“We cannot confirm at the moment whether the organisms are still alive though we have been able to make the endolithic (an organism living between mineral grains of rock) cells grow in laboratory,” Sar said.

This is the first time that such deep life underneath the Earth’s surface have been explored from India and by an initiative led entirely by Indians, he said.

The Deccan volcanism started about 65 million years back and may have continued till 60 million years ago.

However, these volcanic activities happened with several thousand years of time gap which might have allowed early micro-organisms to occupy such extreme habitats.