For the first time, scientists have found complex, multicelled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface — raising new possibilities about both the spread of life on Earth and potential subsurface life on other planets and moons.
Nicknamed “worms from hell,” the nematodes, or roundworms, were found in several gold mines in South Africa, where researchers have also made breakthrough discoveries about deep subterranean single-cell life.
The two lead researchers, Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent in Belgium and Tullis Onstott of Princeton University, said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding “Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.”
“This is telling us something brand new,” said Onstott, whose pioneering work in South Africa over the past decade has revolutionized the understanding of microbial life known generally as extremophiles, which live in places long believed to be uninhabitable.
“For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable,” he said.
An article introducing the subterranean nematodes, one of which was formally named Halicephalobus mephisto after the “Lord of the Underworld,” appears in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature. H. mephisto was found in water flowing from a borehole about 1 mile below the surface in the Beatrix gold mine.
The research is likely to trigger scientific challenges and cause some controversy because it places far more complex life in an environment where researchers have generally held it should not, or even cannot, exist.
In addition to uncovering a new realm of biology on Earth, Borgonie and Onstott wrote that the nematode findings could also have important implications for extraterrestrial research, or astrobiology.
Scientists seeking life beyond Earth are intrigued by the possibility that microbes could be living below the surface of Mars, in particular — a planet that is now cold, dry and bombarded by harmful radiation but was once much wetter, warmer and better protected by an atmosphere.
