Secrets of Ancient Aquifers | Physics Today
View of the prairie in Alberta, Canada, where Emil Ruff and colleagues sampled groundwater from aquifers crossing an area of about 80,000 square miles. Credit: Muhe Diao
About 50% of people around the world rely on groundwater for drinking. It usually contains between 104 and 105 microbial cells per milliliter, and those microbial communities are shaped by and interact with the environment in which they develop. The exact distribution of organisms and the chemistry and physics of the water, including pH levels and temperature, vary between different aquifers.
The effect of those environmental differences on the microbiomes is what Emil Ruff at the University of Chicago–affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and colleagues were hoping to study. Read rest of the article here.