But the fact that it’s commonplace is precisely why Earth’s subsurface biosphere is so compelling. Mud is everywhere, which means it is important. If you add up the total amount of mud underneath all the worlds’s oceans, you come up with a volume equivalent to about the entire Atlantic Ocean. And, per cubic meter, there are 100 to 100,000 times more microbial cells in mud than there are in seawater. That means that there’s so much intraterrestrial life in the subsurface that it’s hard to even fathom it. The total amount of microbial cells in the marine sediment subsurface is estimated to be 2.9 x 10 [to the 29th] cells. This is about 10,000 times more than the estimated number of stars in the universe. But that’s not the whole subsurface. You’d have to at least double this number to include the microbial cells living deep underneath the land. And some of these cells may have found pockets where the food is more abundant than the average location, so more cells can live there than our models predict. For these reasons, the actual number of microbial cells in the subsurface biosphere is certain to be much higher than our current estimates.
That is from the new and interesting IntraTerrestrtials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, by Karen G Lloyd.
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