Global distribution of microbial abundance and biomass in subseafloor sediment

By J. Kallmeyer, R. Pockalny, R. Adhikari, David C. Smith, S. D’Hondt. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012

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The global geographic distribution of subseafloor sedimentary microbes and the cause(s) of that distribution are largely unexplored. Here, we show that total microbial cell abundance in subseafloor sediment varies between sites by ca. five orders of magnitude. This variation is strongly correlated with mean sedimentation rate and distance from land. Based on these correlations, we estimate global subseafloor sedimentary microbial abundance to be 2.9⋅1029 cells [corresponding to 4.1 petagram (Pg) C and ∼0.6% of Earth’s total living biomass]. This estimate of subseafloor sedimentary microbial abundance is roughly equal to previous estimates of total microbial abundance in seawater and total microbial abundance in soil. It is much lower than previous estimates of subseafloor sedimentary microbial abundance. In consequence, we estimate Earth’s total number of microbes and total living biomass to be, respectively, 50–78% and 10–45% lower than previous estimates.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4aa8878e6acf2dbf31cb666b71876808404e1d4a

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Citations in the corpus

A review of prokaryotic populations and processes in sub-seafloor sediments, including biosphere:geosphere interactions (2014, methodology): “Kallmeyer et al. (2012) included the 42% global area of these low cell containing oceanic gyres, together with the depth decrease from 1 mbsf in cell counts and the actual sediment depth at other locations (1° by 1° grid), to provide a new estimate of the total global number of prokaryotic cells in…”
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The potential science and engineering value of samples delivered to Earth by Mars sample return (2019, background): “On Earth, terrestrial mafic and ultramafic igneous aquifers and sedimentary aquifers have been found to be significant microbial habitats (e.g., Ghiorse and Wilson 1988; Stevens and McKinley 1995; Whitman et al. 1998; Onstott et al. 2009; Kallmeyer et al. 2012; Schrenk et al. 2013; Osburn et al. 201”
New perspectives in benthic deep-sea microbial ecology (2015, background): “…the total microbial abundance varies between sites by ca . five orders of magnitude according with mean sedimentation rate and distance from land ( Kallmeyer et al., 2012 ) , it is generally accepted that the abun - dance and biomass of the microbial components are controlled by the quantity and…”
Environmental factors influencing the development and spread of antibiotic resistance (2017, neutral): “The astounding number of bacterial cells on Earth, estimated to around 10 30 —a thousand billion billion billions (Kallmeyer et al. 2012), provide an immense genetic variability, and opportunities for mutations, rearrangements and horizontal gene transfer.”
Extracellular enzymes in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments: perspectives on system variability and common research needs (2013, background): “We thus have almost no data (Kobayashi et al. 2008) on enzymatic activities from the microbial biosphere of deep-subsurface sediments of the ocean basins, which contain an estimated 30 % of the earth’s microbial biomass (Kallmeyer et al. 2012).”
High-Pressure Biochemistry and Biophysics (2013, background): “Although the upper limit of such projections have been questioned recently (Kallmeyer et al. 2012; Colwell and D’Hondt 2013), the subseafloor remains potentially the largest ecosystem on Earth.”
Stochastic Community Assembly: Does It Matter in Microbial Ecology? (2017, background): “Microorganisms are the most diverse group of life on Earth, inhabiting almost every imaginable environment (38).”