Researchers identify an entirely new phylum of archaea (which they named Brockarchaeota) in hot springs in China & deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California.
Earth’s hot springs and hydrothermal vents are home to a previously unidentified group of archaea. And, unlike similar tiny, single-celled organisms that live deep in sediments and munch on decaying plant matter, these archaea don’t produce the climate-warming gas methane, researchers report April 23 in Nature Communications.
“Microorganisms are the most diverse and abundant form of life on Earth, and we just know 1 percent of them,” says Valerie De Anda, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our information is biased toward the organisms that affect humans. But there are a lot of organisms that drive the main chemical cycles on Earth that we just don’t know.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-microbes-recycle-carbon-methane-archaea-microbiology