Episode 47: The Rock-Eaters of the Antrim Shale

<p>You’re standing on a quiet stretch of northern Michigan farmland. The air smells like wet soil and diesel. In front of you is a steel wellhead, nothing dramatic, just another gas well punched into the Antrim Shale, a black, organic-rich rock layer laid down three hundred and fifty million years ago when this part of the world was a shallow, oxygen-starved sea.</p><p><br /></p><p>Energy companies drill these wells, pump up water mixed with natural gas, strip out the methane, and move on. Most people never think twice about what else might be riding up in that water. But one day a University of Michigan team did. </p><p><br /></p><p>They filtered hundreds of liters of that deep water. They stained it. They sequenced the DNA. They even tried to grow whatever was living in it on plates in the lab. What came back was not the usual handful of bacteria and archaea that scientists expect in the deep subsurface.</p><p><br /></p><p>It was a whole hidden community. Hundreds of feet below the surface, between six hundred and fifty and sixteen hundred forty feet down, an entire ecosystem of rock-eating fungi, microscopic animals, and parasites has been quietly thriving in total darkness for thousands of years.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is the story of how we found them… and what it means that they were there all along. This is episode 47, The Rock-Eaters of the Antrim Shale.</p><p><strong>Sources</strong></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1137736" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1137736</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discover-entire-ecosystem-hundreds-of-feet-below-earths-surface-at-depths-thought-inhospitable-to-life" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discover-entire-ecosystem-hundreds-of-feet-below-earths-surface-at-depths-thought-inhospitable-to-life</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.earth.com/news/mysterious-fungi-found-thriving-1600-feet-below-earths-surface-could-affect-underground-carbon-storage/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.earth.com/news/mysterious-fungi-found-thriving-1600-feet-below-earths-surface-could-affect-underground-carbon-storage/</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://gizmodo.com/the-great-lakes-are-hiding-a-secret-underworld-of-tardigrades-and-rock-eating-fungi-2000793324" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://gizmodo.com/the-great-lakes-are-hiding-a-secret-underworld-of-tardigrades-and-rock-eating-fungi-2000793324</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.discoverwildlife.com/environment/deep-subsurface-fungi" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.discoverwildlife.com/environment/deep-subsurface-fungi</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://academic.oup.com/ismej" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://academic.oup.com/ismej</a></p><p>(search title: “Deep subsurface organic-rich shale supports abundant, diverse, and novel fungi”)</p><p><br /><br /></p>