Deep marine biosphere fuelled by increasing organic matter availability during burial and heating

Peter Wellsbury, Kim Goodman, Tanja Barth, Barry A. Cragg, Stephen P. Barnes and R. John Parkes ()
Additional contact information
Peter Wellsbury: University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building
Kim Goodman: University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building
Tanja Barth: University of Bergen
Barry A. Cragg: University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building
Stephen P. Barnes: University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building
R. John Parkes: University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building

Nature, 1997, vol. 388, issue 6642, 573-576

Abstract: Abstract Deep-sea sediments become apparently more hostile to life with increasing depth as temperature and pressure rise, and organic matter becomes increasingly recalcitrant. Demonstrations of high bacterial populations in deep sediments1,2 may thus appear enigmatic. How, then, can the continued presence of active bacterial populations in deep sediments that are over 10 million years old be explained? Although volatile fatty acids, particularly acetate, are important intermediates in the anaerobic degradation of organic matter3,4, their concentrations are kept very low in sediments (

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/41544 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:388:y:1997:i:6642:d:10.1038_41544

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/41544

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().