The steady trickle of paradigm changing biological discoveries in recent years is growing into a torrent. One tributary of this torrent is the repeated discovery of microscopic life forms making a living in places we thought barren, using methods we hadn't known about. Roger Pielke Jr. noticed this syndicated NYT article about the discovery of archaea living in toxic wastes and wondered:

We'd welcome an explanation of the possible (or non) significance of this new paper in Science for understandings of the global carbon cycle. A news story contained the following interesting paragraph (italics added):

Scientists say the discovery could bear on estimates of the pervasiveness of exotic microbial life, which some experts suspect forms a hidden biosphere extending miles underground whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life.

I've been loosely following Craig Venter's exploits on the Sorcerer II as he and a team sail around the world sampling oceanic microbes and sending them back to the lab for DNA sequencing. The vast majority of what they find is unknown and previously unsuspected.

Perhaps more interesting is that this is true in each place they sample with little overlap among them. Each location is a trove of novel DNA with millions of new (to science) genes. You could determine where a vessel loaded its ballast water by sequencing the microbes it contains. This has implications since vessels load ballast in one place and drop it in another as cargos vary. What will be the consequences of this mixing?

The function of many of these genes is still unknown. Researchers around the world are working to understand the new data. I expect many, many papers to be published before long. One interesting discovery is that previous satellite surveys of ocean chlorophyll, considered a proxy measure of global life and so a measure of carbon uptake, may have missed as much as a quarter of ocean life since chlorophyll isn't the only way to harvest solar energy.

The "hidden biosphere extending miles underground whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life" may be small beer compared to the hidden biosphere extending miles underwater, yet both may dwarf what we tend to think of as the biosphere.

We are eggs, not yet even hatchlings.