The Planet Hunters - Extreme Life - Eating Rocks

We are trying to imagine how some of life could survive in the most extreme environments and yet some of the most extreme conditions are found right here on earth. We will come face to face with the most extreme organism in our own earth that survives by eating rocks.
Penny Boston, she spends her life in some of the darkest most hostile places on earth. She’s looking for extremophiles. Microbes that can thrive in places that would kill most other creatures.

“What we’re doing in extreme environments on earth is really trying to write a field guide into micro organisms on planets that we’ve never been.” Says Penny Boston. “Organisms that we don’t even know they exist yet.”

Caverns in New Mexico, these are some of the deepest caves in America what could possibly exist down here in zero sun light? The lights may be off but somebody’s in. Penny Boston has found microbes that nourish themselves by literarily chomping their way through solid rock. Rock eaters.
“These are the organisms that manage to liberate small quantities of material from the rock itself that is they chemically react these and during that reaction they get energy from that process and that’s the energy that provides the foundation of their life and so then they use that energy just as we eat food at the dinner table and so their ability to survive in an environment that is essentially food free is one of the things we are focusing on the most intensely.” Said Penny Boston.
It’s not just in deep cave systems that these extremophiles, microbes are thriving. Mono lake in California, it may look beautiful but the salt levels three times greater than in any seawater, which is poisonous to humans but it’s teaming with microbial life.
Extremophiles can survive extreme cold too. The fox tunnel in Alaska an extremely cold environment but amazingly even here there are microorganisms in the permafrost that can stay frozen for millions of years and they are still alive. By warming them up scientists have been able to revive these dormant organisms.
As much as we can stretch our imagination in every conceivable direction of the limit of life that makes us better and better prepared to recognize life as we see it wherever we find it elsewhere. In our solar system and ultimately beyond.

So what we need is an interplanetary field trip to search for microbial life.

Image: Living bacteria, shown in green, that astrobiologist Richard Hoover found within the ice of the Fox permafrost tunnel. The bacteria are about 32,000 years old.