An ecosystem discovered 2.8 kilometers underground in the Mponeng Gold Mine near Johannesburg, South Africa two years ago has now been shown to comprise only a single species of microbe, existing on energy from radioactivity, completely independently of the Sun.
Confirming earlier inferences, the new work shows that D. audaxviator’s metabolic processes are decoupled from the Sun and the photosynthetic biosphere. This ecosystem uses the energy of naturally occurring radioactivity to split water into hydrogen and hydrogen peroxide.
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