LONDON, Oct 26 (Reuter) - Bacteria buried deep in the earth and surviving in spartan conditions have boosted hopes of finding life on Mars, scientists said on Thursday.
U.S. researchers working in the Columbia River, Washington State found an ecosystem living on a diet of rock and water, which may be generating marketable quantities of natural gas.
``All the ingredients should be present in subsurface Mars,'' Todd Stevens of the U.S. government's Pacific Northwest Laboratory told The New Scientist magazine.
NASA scientists told him they long suspected that similar ecosystems could be lurking under the chilly and inhospitable surface of Mars, a dusty, red, eroded lava plain where temperatures never rise above freezing.
The newly-found organisms, buried in basalt, apparently survive without any energy input from the sun or any geothermal warmth from the earth's interior.
Stevens and fellow researcher Jim McKinley named the bacteria SLIME -- a subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem.